data management

No dashboard, just an ironing board

June 14, 2011

As if to renounce one more convention of business, a Berkeley-area businessperson I know couldn’t find data, so he went out and got some of his own. He had to evaluate market areas. For three days, he stood by an ironing board with a map on top in front of the Cheese Board in Berkeley’s [...]

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Tools and those who enable their misuse

February 1, 2010

To get a data architect I know worked up, just ask him about how customers end up buying the wrong tools. How about sales people who push federation tools on those who actually need data warehouses? “It all sounds extremely sexy,” says my source, who works for a major business intelligence vendor and whom I [...]

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Rolling heads can’t think

January 12, 2010

Wolf Blitzer calls for heads to roll after the Christmas Day attack. But Jill Dychè is a data pro, and she’d rather let the heads think. “Who should get fired?” is the same conversation as after screwups in corporations, writes Dychè, principal at Baseline Consulting. Instead, the government should be addressing process issues. Indeed, the [...]

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Storage goes node to node

June 25, 2009

The bad guys do it. Malware and terrorists distribute themselves, hide, and wait for a call from Mother. Now one company is doing the same with backup storage. As the bad guys have known for a long time, the strategy is cheap and reliable. “It’s disruptive as hell” for the data storage industry, says up-to-now [...]

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Dings to talk about when offshoring data

October 9, 2008

Restless minds will want to know what Asian manufacture of furniture, clothes, electronics and other goods has to do with business intelligence. A globe-trotting industrial engineer who’d rather not be named has been telling me about different perceptions of quality among nationalities. He works on contract to American companies to ensure that product quality lives [...]

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That old clunky thing

July 12, 2007

A friend of Datadoodle recalls this story: He stood before a room full of IT people who worked on mainframes and asked them, “‘How many of you feel responsibility for the quality of the data?’” Not one raised a hand. He said to them, “OK, now you’re the CIO and I’m a salesman. And I [...]

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The “personal data warehouse” debate sounds so familiar

June 14, 2007

Look closely at business intelligence and you see the world. Larissa T. Moss writes today in TDWI Flashpoint about the “the new debate” over enterprise data warehouses vs. personal data warehouses. One side believes in one-for-all. The other side believes that by taking care of Me first, I can take care of You. Where have [...]

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