From Day One, data warehouses and their offspring—data marts, operational data stores, data lakes, lakehouses, and the like—have been technological work-arounds. In Building the Data Warehouse, the 1992 book that launched modern decision support, Bill Inmon recognized the need for a decision support architecture that was different from the existing Read more…
I’m not sure that I know anyone in the data and analytics field whose platform doesn’t face continuous, or at least annual, budget scrutiny. Analytics is expensive. And when cost-cutting is the order of the day, analytics is a big target. Up shields. Time for another Business Value Inventory. I’ve Read more…
Important lessons can be learned in one of two ways: the easy way or the hard way. I prefer the easy way, but when it comes to Data Quality, it seems like I’m in the minority. Last week we wondered aloud whether data quality really matters. This week we’ll see a Read more…
Maybe we’ve been going about this all wrong. It seems that everybody in the information management field continually emphasizes the importance of Data Quality, and everybody not in the information management field couldn’t care less. Maybe the latter group has it right. After all, product is flowing out and revenue Read more…
Having worked in the transportation and logistics industry for nearly 30 years, the question that friends, family, and colleagues ask most often these days is some variation of, “Is Amazon going to start competing head-to-head with other parcel services?” Now I can just refer them here for my answer. Before Read more…
In a 1993 Seinfeld episode, Jerry describes the psychological leverage that doctors use on their patients. They tell you to go into the little room and take your pants off and wait. Then, “anybody that comes in with pants on seems like they know what they’re talking about. In any Read more…
I once served as Lead Architect on a very large project where I had to produce process and data flow diagrams that included several application areas with which I was not familiar. Not surprisingly, they went through many, many iterations. After we had successfully delivered the project, the Domain Architect Read more…
Disruption is imminent. Is your company prepared? Your IT department? You? What do bank tellers, assembly line workers, retail clerks, blacksmiths, and travel agents have in common? They have all been largely displaced by technology. Application developers are next. In just a few years Generative AI will produce most of Read more…
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a very simple metric to assess how serious a company is about its information management practices: The number of software releases delayed solely because the data has not been properly curated. I have yet to see a single example. Software releases Read more…
Everybody likes a pithy definition. Marketers describe them as “sticky,” meaning that they’re easy to remember. Of course, that doesn’t always mean they’re useful or completely accurate. Information Management has a couple. Metadata is almost universally described as “Data About Data,” but I’d be willing to bet that you rolled Read more…