While developers do need development environments that support new approaches to developing code that works and that help speed and improve the application development process, they also need tools that help them move beyond code. In particular they need a development environment that:

• Ensures that decision-making logic is managed declaratively as a set of business rules
• Integrates analytics into this decision-making logic in a useful way
• Helps them put process or workflow into a process management tool
• Helps them define events and how events will be correlated and processed

As long as development environments assume that everything can and should be written as code, I do not believe they will be “perfect”. Code is the right way to do a whole bunch of things in application development...

Well, James Cameron didn’t exactly walk away empty-handed from Sunday’s 2010 Academy Awards, winning three Oscars in predominantly technical categories out of nine nominations. But, I’d be willing to bet he expected an even-bigger armful of the trophies, especially considering that Avatar is THE biggest box-office success in the world, ever. While the awards weren’t necessarily forthcoming, I suspect the Academy still recognizes a revolution when it sees one. The true advent 3-D content has arrived—and Avatar has made that very clear in a very big way.

I remember a time, something like three decades ago, when a 3-D experience meant a trip to the local 7-Eleven to buy green and red lenses to watch an Elvira “Movie Macabre” horror special on our home television. The highlight came as the Mistress of the Dark tossed a few handfuls of popcorn at the screen, causing me to squeal in delight. The fact that my parents allowed their young child to watch such garbage is the subject of another discussion.

My how things have changed. It’s been more than three-decades since 3-D made its first forays into our living rooms...

White papers are still one of the most popular marketing tools for BI and high tech companies, among others. Proof positive is that I just finished my fifth white paper in almost as many weeks.

I find some long held beliefs about white papers very interesting. Like many opinions, some are held long past their expiration dates. For some, they want things a certain way because “that’s the way we’ve always done it.”

I particularly find strong opinions around whether or not to include a table of contents and executive summary, and how long the white paper should be. Here are some considerations I think should help make an objective decision:

Table of contents – Personally, I’m not a big fan of using a ToC in white papers, unless they are very long (12 or more pages). Your goal is to get your reader reading right away and keep them reading. The ToC is yet one more distraction. Having said that, I think they are very helpful in longer papers. Readers can use them to quickly find sections they want to read again. Skimmers will use them to review the flow to get a quick understanding of where the topic is going...

Oscar night and here I am blogging, did you see that Sandra Bullock?  Was that couture or was that couture?  And that Steve Martin what a hoot, really fake arrow through the head that never gets old.  When I was on the red carpet earlier I almost gagged when I saw Joan Rivers ….  Oh yeah, data, databases, customers …  I got all dressed up for nothing…

Just checking in is a cross channel interaction. 

I finally did the iPhone check-in for a flight and it was pretty impressive – no boarding pass, just swiped my phone through security and at the gate and onto the plane.  That was pretty cool as I am always wondering where my boarding pass is while I wait for my flight.

The context of this is also interesting.  I left Denver on a 4 day, 3 city trip – Chicago, Raleigh, Atlanta and back to Denver.  I forgot to online check-in when I left my house so I had to do it at the kiosk.  Then I checked in at the office in Chicago for my next flight, but I had to print it because it wouldn’t let me do the iPhone thing for the United Express flight.  Then – I did the kiosk thing again in Raleigh because...

Until recently, open source solutions were most popular within various developer communities but remained on the fringe of general business intelligence implementations. Over the past couple of years, however, open source BI, data warehousing, and data integration solutions have become more mainstream within the BI market creating a shift in the way BI solution providers.   Now instead of open source providers having to educate the market about the value of their solutions, BI players are looking to mimic general open source principles in order to increase general solution adoption and market share.

Over the past several months, many solution providers have developed free solutions that are similar to open source offerings in the sense that they are free versions of software that can be used as a first step in BI adoption or to explore and compare various solutions at one time.  For instance, InetSoft recently announced their 2.0 version of their free dashboard solution and Tableau has launched an online dashboard that can be used to analyze public information.  Both offer organizations an alternative to traditional dashboards.

As the market continues to ... read more >>

Did anyone else catch this story yesterday? Colorful golfer John Daly recently exacted revenge on a reporter who published a story on Daly’s lengthy disciplinary history on the PGA tour. From the article:

Daly referred to Florida Times-Union golf writer Garry Smits as a “jerk” and posted the writer’s personal cell phone number.

“Call and flood his line and let’s tell him how we feel,” Daly wrote.

He added two tweets on the matter, saying “this isn’t journalism, it’s paparrazi — like gossip.” In a later post, he again ran Smits’ phone number.

Now, I understand that sites such as TMZ and shows such as Extra only exist because many, many people read and watch them, respectively. If so many didn’t care about the foibles of JLo, “Brangelina“, and Tiger’s mistresses, these sites wouldn’t be nearly as popular. They are just giving us what we want.

Turning the Tables

Let me clear: I certainly don’t pity celebrities who make millions of dollars per year. It must be nice to have that kind of financial security, even if they give up privacy. Many of us would gladly make this trade-off.

In Daly’s case, the guy’s no saint...