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Back to the Future: Moving forward by revisiting the past
As I am about to embark on the bi-annual Teradata User Group tour (and hope to see some of you there!) to discuss our latest 14.0 release, I wanted to get on my soapbox about a topic that frequently arises. This is the lament about not having...
Remedial Math: Understanding TCO and ROI
During my recent travels there were a lot of comments around either the cost of a data warehouse or the lack of value being perceived from the data warehouse. As I dug deeper into the conversations it became clear why all the questions were...
IT: Get the Emphasis on the Right Word (Hint: It’s not the 'T')
There is a lot of chatter as the New Year starts as to what each vendor is going to bring to the table in 2012. We have “Big Data”. “The Cloud”, “in-memory”, solid state drives, and many other exciting technology announcements. Teradata...
Big Data - Quantity vs Quality: Don’t confuse lots of data with good data
In the paper today (San Diego Union Tribune, Sunday 1/15) there was a good article on the need for data miners given the explosion of data that is currently occurring. One point of note was that one of the biggest challenges is making data...
Redefining Business Intelligence: Don’t play the game, change the game!
I recently saw the movie ‘Moneyball’. The book was good and fit very well with my interest. Now that it is more readily available via the movies, I have to once again recommend it to people. I had recommended the book to some...
The Ever-changing Analyst Role
Always good to have a theme where our blog community can share thoughts on a common topic. This topic of how the role of the analyst is changing has long been a favorite of mine. I will start by breaking the role into three main groups...
Big Data: It’s About the Data, Not About the Big
Today in my local paper there was an article on the 17th annual Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining conference. The gist was about the need for data analytics and how companies are looking for good people that understand that realm. Of...
What to Do When You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know…
So once again there was a great coincidence from my travels. Three times in the past week I was told that infamous line “We don’t know what we don’t know”. While I understand the sentiment behind the comment, it is often just an empty...
DM Radio: EDW Mistakes to Avoid
Last week I had the opportunity to participate in a DM Radio interview. There was a panel of several of us industry types being asked question by the host Eric Kavanagh. He was assisted this time by co-host Robin Bloor. The topic...
Governance: If It Isn’t Logical, It’s Political
It is hard to turn on the radio or TV, or read the paper or news web sites, without being deluged with the current political dilemmas. Often times, people in business are accused of “playing politics” or having a political agenda. More often than...
What Is Your Dashboard Telling You?
One of my favorite analogies is that pertaining to “dashboards”. For the past year or so, everyone has been asking for dashboards to help run their business. Forget the fact that they're currently not even be able to get data in a timely...
What Do You Mean by BI?
For some reason the topic of “best practice BI” has been popping up very frequently of late. In the past 3 weeks I have been asked to speak on this topic at least 5 times. IN the hopes that I can head some of this repetitive discussion...
