Following up on several earlier posts by Charlie Maitland and probably soon to appear all around the BI-related blogosphere, the CTP for PPS is available now! At least I can see it through the Microsoft Connect program. Can’t wait to install a copy and start exploring what’s there – Microsoft seems to be up to something really big here.
Archive for November, 2006
Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 CTP available now
November 22, 2006What kind of information worker are you?
November 16, 2006Mark Bower posted long ago now his definitions of the various kinds of information worker categories. This is useful to keep in mind when you design enterprise solutions to be used by a variety of these profiles.
7 habits of effective desktop data management
November 13, 2006Following up on a somewhat theoretical introductory post related to desktop data management, Here are 7 habits which which should prove useful when approaching any desktop data-related task. These will be refined based on the discussion you and I will have here, so let me know what you think.
I was actually shooting for 10 commandments, but 7 habits sounded good, too. Seven should be enough to start the discussion anyway, and leave room for expansion without making the number ridiculously large should we end up adding a few.
Now remember. This is supposed to apply to desktop work so let’s not wander off too far into foreign keys, surrogate keys or normal forms territory;-)
Here we go:
- Any data processing task takes you through the steps of organizing data, processing it and presenting it. Acknowledge these steps in your workflow and organize around them.
- Do the hard work first. Looking up and presenting information is both easier to perform and more valuable when it is base on a well-organized data layer.
- Organize your data as flat files instead of free-form tables. The flexibility of spreadsheets makes them both a blessing and a curse, often leading you to design the processing and presentation layers first and the data organization layer last. Organizing your data as flat files may require some more work upstream but will pay off handsomely downstream. See #2.
- Strive for one source of truth. An important piece of information should have to be changed in one place only and cascade from there.
- As much as reasonably possible, always work with a full dataset that includes domains contiguous to the one you’re currently working on. You’ll be much better off keeping too much information and identifying records appropriately than discarding what you still think you won’t need – but will.
- Don’t design for exceptions. You want a few standard tools that abide by the principles above while allowing you to handle exceptions, not multiple unmanageable tools that were each designed to handle a specific exception.
- Use identifiers. Referred to as Unique IDs or keys in database jargon, the important idea to remember is that you want a way to lookup a particular item of data at any point in time and distinguish it unequivocally from its neighbors.
Each of these items deserves several posts and I will be following up on each – hopefully with a mix of opinions, examples, tool-agnostic tips, and tool-specific tricks.
Google ranking
November 13, 2006Considering my shifting requirements (more family, more work, less hacking), it only made sense to migrate my personal website over to a hosted wordpress blog. The Pair Networks team has been wonderful over the last few years but I simply don’t need that much infastructure.
It’s always fun to check your Google ranking once you’ve performed such a change. As of today, the second entry that Google picks is a link to a fairly irrelevant post about multi-level marketing. The fifth entry actually links to the WordPress “relocation” tag page where my short piece on what I learned looking for a job is (for whatever reason) picked as the day’s featured blog.
Switching over to Google groups (Usenet, really) provides a different, unfortunate picture. Boy, what was I even thinking about 10 years ago? I had probably spent too much time trying to get things to work and frustration way beginning to become apparent. This has got to be a lesson to remember…
Hopefully this blog’s content related to Data Management and Business Intelligence with progressively take precedence over less relevant material.
I’d rather have this piece comparing Business Objects and Microsoft Analysis Services cubes come up first;-)
The relationship between BI and BPM
November 8, 2006Two recent posts from Craig Schiff and Stephen Swoyer put the relationship between Business Intelligence (BI) and Business Performance Management (BPM) in perspective.
A new site dedicated to information workers
November 1, 2006Arno Nel is up to something with his Information Worker website:
Our vision is to develop the site into a place where technical people will turn when they need help or want to see what else can be done, and where business people will interact with peers to understand the difference that technology can make in their own environment through the sharing of problems, solutions, approaches and methodologies.
If you took the time to check out this page, then IW is most probably worth a visit, too.
Should a dashboard provide quick answers or prompt for more questions?
November 1, 2006A recent article at Joining Dots compares traditional KPI displays (value, colored indicator, trend arrow) to spark lines and bullet graphs. The auther has a point when he says:
The irony is, dashboards that provide quick answers are largely redundant any way. Quick answers are answers you already know and just want validated.
As suggested in the article, a sparkline is fairly easy to build. Should you like to experiment with bullet graphs, however, ExcelUser has a great tutorial. You may also want to download and try an add-in such as MicroCharts 1.0 which does sparklines, bullet graphs and more.
The only complaint I have about MicroCharts is that it interacts in some strange ways with other add-ins such as XLCubed – which I use daily. Other than that, it looks very nicely implemented.
The (Steep) SQL Server 2005 Learning Curve
November 1, 2006Stephen Swoyer has published a brief analysis at TDWI on why the SQL Server installed base seems to be growing relatively slowly. Bottom line: the learning curve is steep and corporations cannot easily replace prior SQL Server versions running mission-critical applications.
You’ve got to love his quote of Adam Machanic (SQL Server MVP) saying that “comparing DTS to SSIS… would be like comparing a pea shooter to a neutron bomb[…]”. I’ve been rather more involved with Analysis Services than Integration Services, but this is exactly the way I’ve felt about the OLAP side of things…
As far as desktop data management goes, the big news with Microsoft’s latest release has got to be the free SQL Server Express Edition. From a data storage & processing standpoint, this is a interesting alternative to Microsoft Access. You may still need the latter (or another Office component such as Excel) as a graphical interface into your data, but if you’re expecting your requirements to grow, this will be much easier to scale to an enterprise version when required.
Updated: Learning curve or not, this version of Microsoft’s database offering is worth the effort, according to some.
