Data Doghouse - performance management, business intelligence, and data warehousing

Business Intelligence (BI) Industry Jargon

When teaching people about business intelligence (BI), data integration and data warehousing, after introductions and reviewing the syllabus or agenda, I present my jargon and acronym slide. I always tease that there will be a quiz on these terms. I do this with people from IT, business groups, software vendors or students (in a Master's degree program at an engineering university.) It does not matter what the technical expertise of the crowd - they always laugh.

Any IT specialty has its jargon, but we seem to have more than our share in business intelligence. Having a lot of terms and acronyms is usually fine, but in BI we do not always agree on the definition and, even worse, we sometimes use different terms for the same thing.

If the experts, industry analysts and pundits cannot agree then how does everyone else understand what is going on? How do people learn this field and leverage others' experiences?

My New Year's wish is that it becomes easier for people to get through the jargon and build or have access to better BI solutions.

My jargon list includes these terms or acronyms:

• Business Intelligence (BI)
• Performance Management (PM)
• Operational BI
• On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP)
• MOLAP, ROLAP, DOLAP
• Analytical Applications
• Predictive Analytics
• “Slice & Dice" and Drill down
• Data Mining
• Data Visualization
• Dashboards, Scorecards
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
• Data Shadow Systems or Spreadmarts
• DW & BI Appliances
• Data Warehouses (DW)
• Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW)
• Data Marts (DM)
• Operational Data Stores (ODS)
• Hub & Spoke Architecture
• Data Integration
• Extract, Transform & Load (ETL)
• Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)
• Enterprise Information Integration (EII)
• Extract, Load & Transform (ELT)
• Change Data Capture (CDC)
• SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)
• Real-time Access, BI, DI or DW
• SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) or On-Demand Software versus On-Premise Software
• Cloud Computing
• E/R Modeling versus Dimensional Modeling
• Dimensions & Facts
• Star & Snowflake Schemas versus 3NF (3rd Normal Form)
• Conformed Dimensions
• Slowly Changing Dimensions (SCD)
• MDM (Master Data Management)
• CDI (Customer Data Integration)
• PIM Product Information Management)
• Open Source Software (OSS)
• Relational versus Columnar Databases
• Unstructured Data
• Enterprise Data Mashups
• Data Governance
• Metadata Management
• Enterprise Information Management (EIM)
• BICC (BI Centers of Excellence)
• ICC (Integration Centers of Excellence)
• Data quality (DQ) & data cleansing
• SMP versus MPP

Happy New Year

P.S. The graphic was generated by using Wordle. This is not an endorsement of the site.

TDWI Boston Chapter Meeting - January 14: Maintaining Security, Privacy, and Accountability in DW/BI Implementations

You are cordially invited to attend the upcoming TDWI Boston Chapter meeting. All BI and DW professionals are welcome to attend. Space is limited, so visit this page to RSVP early.

• When: January 14, 2009, 1:00–4:00 p.m.
• Where: Children's Hospital Boston, 1 Autumn Street, Auditorium A, Boston, MA
  Note: This meeting is on Children's Hospital Boston's main city campus, not the suburban campus. The main campus is located in the Longwood Medical Area, which is known for very ample public transportation, but heavy traffic. Please use public transportation if at all possible. Here is a link to public transportation options, and here is map and driving directions to 1 Autumn St., Boston. The building is at the corner of Autumn Street and Longwood Avenue. The best bet for parking is in the garage across the street at 375 Longwood Avenue.
• Presentation: "Maintaining Security, Privacy, and Accountability in DW/BI Implementations"

The Business Intelligence director's 2009 letter to Santa

(As seen on SearchDataManagement.com)

I've written letters to Santa before requesting gifts that data management and data warehousing managers would appreciate. With the current economic climate, many business intelligence (BI) managers, like the person below, are putting together their wish lists for Santa. How many of these things are on your list?

Dear Santa,

I think you'll agree that I deserve more than coal in my stocking. I've been a good BI director all year (actually for years) by working with businesspeople, my development staff and my peers on our BI projects. Our BI solutions have been successful and provide business value. The business is quite happy and tells me our BI solutions have helped on sales, marketing, logistics and finance in many business initiatives. The projects have been on time and under budget (well, maybe the under-budget part isn't quite true).

But this year, Santa, even though our company continues to grow and prosper, company management is worried about the economy...

>>> Read the rest of this letter to Santa

Letters to Santa

In previous years SearchDataManagement.com has posted my articles with letters to Santa. Until the new one is published later this week, here's a reminder of what a data warehouse manager might have asked for in the past.

2007 - I've Been a Good Data Warehouse Manager, Santa
I've been a very good data warehouse manager all year long. I've been nice to everyone -- even business users. I've kept up with the industry by reading articles and analyst opinions. I have also tried to follow all the best practices that are recommended in these articles and opinions. But I feel like the business users just don't appreciate what we are doing to get them a "single version of the truth."

Read the rest of the letter.

2005 - Dear Santa, I've been a good data management manager
I've been a good data management manager all year long. I've been nice to my business users, managers and peers. I've provided thorough materials explaining the value of our company's data management efforts to my managers so they could present it to upper management. I've kept up ith the latest data management best practices, technological innovations and industry trends. I've even championed data stewardship and ownership; explained the connection between financial transparency and metadata (which made everyone think I was an alien!); and encouraged the IT staff to document its applications. But sometimes, Santa, I think I am Don Quixote chasing the windmills.

Read the rest of the letter.

The 2008 letter will be coming soon!

Get the architecture right and good things will happen

My new podcast with Smart Data Collective discusses how too many IT projects provide only short-term solutions. Management ends up frustrated not only because of the time and cost these projects consume, but also because the solutions are not responsive to their needs. 

You need to create an architectural blueprint and make sure someone is responsible for the balance between the hub (data warehouse) and spokes (data marts and cubes) of your intelligence efforts. But, important as architecture is, companies shouldn’t become too enamored of it. At the end of the day, the goal isn’t to perfect the data, but to “enable business to make decisions.

Listen to the podcast at Smart Data Collective.

New Age Data Warehousing

Data warehousing (DW) and business intelligence (BI) have been evolving and getting more sophisticated over the years. As IT folks, consultants and analysts gain more experience, they often share those experiences when they work at other companies, publish articles or conduct training. By sharing their knowledge, they have helped to improve the overall intelligence of our industry. This has led to the creation of conventional wisdom about how to design, build and deploy DW and BI solutions. This wisdom is a great guide, especially for people who are just getting involved in implementations and don’t yet understand what they need to do.

But there is a dark side to conventional wisdom when people treat it like gospel. Too often, people blindly follow the usual advice without making sure that it actually applies to their particular situation. Sometimes you should challenge conventional wisdom.

>>> Read the rest of my article New Age Data Warehousing on the DM Review website.

The Indexes are Back

For those that look at the BI/DW and On-Demand (or SaaS) Indices, the YTD performances are working again. The indexes both use Google Docs with calls to Google Finance for various stock quotes and metrics. What better way to create an index on On-Demand Software then by using that technology.

Thanks to the Google Docs and Google Finance teams for fixing a bug.

Sometime last week the Google Finance API calls for historical quotes stopped returning any values older than 3 months. I reported the bugs and within a few days the bug was fixed. 

Enjoy the indices. They are for informational purposes only. If you choose to invest in any of these stocks please perform your due diligence (and hope for a bull market to return.)

Suggestions and feedback are welcome on either index. Also if there is a company you feel we should consider please send them along.

Data is the Problem, not Excel

It’s funny that Forrester’s Boris Evelson recently received a slew of comments from data warehousing and business intelligence pros wondering why they hadn’t included an evaluation of Excel as a business intelligence tool. Boris goes on to explain why Excel doesn’t work as a standalone BI tool.

Here’s my take on the subject:

Like it or not, the most widely used BI tool today is the spreadsheet. If you are a BI or data warehousing manager, you need harbor no illusions that you are gathering and manually entering data into spreadsheet. Furthermore, you need to work with the logic captured in Excel spreadsheets and enable this logic to be used for analysis and decision support.

What’s the problem? Simple. The proliferation of custom-built reports with unstructured data pulled from who-knows-where using self-serving metrics brings into question the value of the information available.

>>>Continue reading Data is the Problem, not Excel