The Journey Begins

It is pretty embarassing when you come back to a blog and the last posting was in November of 2005. Well given the new Web 2.0 world it must be time to start collaborating and sharing knowledge rather than being a scrooge and keeping it all in your head.

After about 7 years working in the field of Business Intelligence it is a scary prospect to stand up on your hind legs and sniff out what is happening on the horizon. It used to be so simple to do BI. Here was my typical project

1. Hear about some Business Unit that was looking at new reporting requirements. Well, reporting??? That is what we used to do, it is kind of embarrassing to think about how many reporting solutions were branded as "business intelligence"!
2. What's the first thing you do now?? Call the user? Are you kidding, what the heck do they know? I know what to do, lets look at the source systems, who cares how they are used!
3. Oh boy, data analysis, a BI geek's dream. Here we go, warm up your SQL coding fingers. Yee haw, lets do some group bys, order bys, distinct values until we curl up at night dreaming inner joins and histograms.
4. Once you know that data model and the data inside it you are off to the races (who cares how the data gets populated into the database, that would mean talking to the users, big no no)
5. Ok, now the fun part, lets design as many star schemas as are needed to use every single element in that source system. We don't know if these subject areas are going to be useful, but gosh darn it we are going to give it to the business. BTW, they call customer's accounts? But the source system column name was customer_id? (pesky users)
6. Now that we have our destination schema, now the truly fun part. And wasn't it fun? Nothing like hand coding hundreds of stored procedures to do your extract, transform and load routines. It was truly a dream for the hyper-active coder, to be pulling your hair out encompassing complex business rules directly in your code.
7. Oh the sweat and tears when you try to make this all work together, like pulling out finger nails with pliers. But eventually you get the spaghetti factory moving, you feel like the next BI messiah.
8. Hmmm, hey did anyone ask those pesky users if they wanted any reports off this beauty of complex systems?

If was fun wasn't it? The fact that your business users look at you like you have two heads didn't phase you at the time...

Thankfully, we have matured and have put in place some extremely sophisticated tools to make the above artwork of luck and raw perserverence something that is much more accomplishable. We are now poised on the next wave of innovation within the Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management industy, the new world of the collaborative web is going to take all this great information we can provide and place it within webs of users communities that can turn this information into action and results.

As I embark on this journey to see what is the right Business Intelligence strategy for my employer, I look forward to sharing what I find with whoever runs across this blog. If you have any comments or contrary opinions to those I state please, please comment, comment, comment. I'm wrong a lot, but it sure is fun to try! 8)

Mark