Ways to Learn

I know there are many ways to learn (read, school, listen, watch, …).  My favorite is to watch and listen to other people.  I am really lucky to have some interesting people to learn from.

In a discussion with another traveler on Sunday we ended up talking about learning from Children.  He agreed with me that there is a natural curiosity that children have that along the lines is lost.  For example, young children will ask you over and over the same question.  It is very frustrating as an adult, but it is a great lesson for us as grown ups.

Don’t be afraid to ask the question until you understand the answer.  So why does this apply to IT and Data Warehousing…

Often the business asks us to answer a business question and one of two things I have seen happens over and over.  Either we in IT don’t understand the business or requirements better or we don’t challenge the knowledge of the data.  This is one of the reasons that if the business asks us a business question and the Business Intelligence group can often come up with 10 different answers.

I had this happen this week with a client working session that I had to ask the question several different ways to help me truely understand the nature of an address that was required.

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