Benefits of Business Intelligence

As with many ventures that cost capital, we need to find the return to the organization.  Often Business Intelligence (BI) has softer value, but in Claudia Imhoff‘s presentation at Think Big she shared some great building blocks of which her experience found value. Some of

CoffeeCAST – #12 – Open Discussion

Welcome to the 12th Episode of Coffee Conversations (now to be called CoffeeCAST) with Stephen Hayward of Project X. This week we are podcasting from the Starbucks at Bayview with Michael Ianni-Palarchio (MIP) where we decided to have a spontaneous CoffeeCAST on a variety of subjects.

Data Model – Notes from Think Big

In last weeks Think Big DW Conference 2006, Stephen Brobst the CTO at Teradata gave a talk on The Sins of Denormalization.  It was a great little chat with the audience.  In the talk he discussed the Data Model.  Before I start, I thought I would jump on Wikipedia to ge

What it is, is what it is.

Sitting in my cubicle today I heard this over the divider, "What it is, is what it is."  Meaning the data warehouse data load job was running longer than expected and no one could explain why.  But that was okay because in the computer business we have to expect th

Consultant Effectiveness

Many years ago, I read an article Advice to Internal & External Consultants: Expand Your Client’s Capacity to Use Your Help, Robert H. Schaffer, Advanced Management Journal, Autumn 1976. Early in the article Bob talks about how much potential is lost to make business perform bette

Readiness Factors – Management Demands

A key factor in determining readiness of a person to change is the demands that management place on the person.  If the expectations of management are not clear or unfocused the readiness will likely be low.  An example is if a person in the accounting department is expected