When I began this blog, it was my intention to include articles about beekeeping. It’s been a few months so I figure it’s about time. Two things happen when you start talking beekeeping. First, you can end up monologuing non-stop Read more
Last weekend I attended the memorial service for Harold Taylor, a FedEx friend and colleague who had succumbed to cancer in February. About a dozen of his co-workers gathered with family and friends in a chapel in Pontotoc, Mississippi. Tables Read more
Peter Drucker famously said that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Well, he didn’t really say that. Sort of the same way that Humphrey Bogart never said “Play it again Sam” in Casablanca. Drucker actually said, “Culture, no matter how defined, Read more
We expect computers to be perfect. We usually don’t give it a second thought. We expect the document opened today to look exactly the same as it did when it was saved last night. We expect the data inserted in Read more
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 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 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 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 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 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 Read more