Jim Harris is the Blogger-in-Chief at Obsessive-Compulsive Data Quality (OCDQ), an independent blog offering a vendor-neutral perspective on data quality.

Harris is an independent consultant, speaker, writer and blogger with over 15 years of professional services and application development experience in data quality (DQ), data integration, data warehousing (DW), business intelligence (BI), customer data integration (CDI), and master data management (MDM).  He has worked with Global 500 companies in finance, brokerage, banking, insurance, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, retail, telecommunications, and utilities.

Jim has a long history with the product that is now known as IBM InfoSphere QualityStage.  Additionally, he has some experience with Informatica Data Quality and DataFlux dfPower Studio.

Harris is a member of the International Association for Information and Data Quality (IAIDQ) and the Iowa Chapter of Data Management Association International (DAMA).

Connect with Jim.

Gartner identifies 3 main components of a well established BI strategy:

WHO: Describes who in the organization will have which roles in building and consuming the BI initiatives. This includes defining organizational and individual roles and combines the IT and business managers together.

WHAT: Describes the role of BI within an organization. What is the company trying to achieve with the BI program?

HOW: Describes the plan of how to achieve those objectives.

Do you agree?  What do you feel is the most important aspect of your BI strategy?

What do I mean by this ? Well classical decisions theory presupposes the “rational actor” who will engage in analytical reasoning and come up with the best course of action. However Nobel-prize winning research by Daniel Kahneman amongst others has clearly demonstrated that even the smartest of us rely on intuitive shortcuts known as cognitive or heuristic biases. For example Harry Markowitz, the Nobel laureate who is the father of modern investment portfolio theory famously engaged in the naïve diversification heuristic when choosing the weighting of his own pension portfolio:

In short US academics all subscribe to a pretty standard pension plan, the choice is how much you split between bonds & equity. Obviously bonds have a lower short term risk, but also a lower long term yield…. so a young person might well pick 90 % Equity 10% Bonds and as they come closer to retirement age the ratio would converge or even cross over. However instead of engaging in such rational analysis … Harry just did a rule of thumb split and went for 50/50 … i.e. the naïve diversification heuristic !

When asked about how he allocated his retirement investments in his TIAA-CREF account, Nobel laureate Harry Markowitz, one of the founders of modern portfolio theory, con- fessed: “I should have computed the historic covariances of the asset classes and drawn an efficient frontier. Instead, . . . I split my contributions fifty?fifty between bonds and equities”

Now if people that smart & knowledgeable make bad decisions in comfortable environments… what hope for the pressured business executive ?

However hope is at hand as people can learn how they think and become better at critical thinking

We as practitioners need to consider these factors when designing “decision support systems” and we need to step back and think about how to help clients make the right decisions.  I will post more on this topic soon.

How would you advise business managers to deal with EAS customization decisions when cost and resources are a factor?

Business Solution Offerings 

MIKE2.0 Business Solutions provide recommendations for solving a number of business problems for which information management is critical to success.

MIKE2.0 solutions include:

• Agile Business Transformation
• E-Discovery
• An Information Development Approach to MiFID
• Being a Leader in Consumer Lending
• An Integrated Approach to Meeting Regulatory Requirements
• Global Identity Management
• Improving Customer Profitability
• Billing Systems Consolidation
• Supply Chain Management
• Building the Customer-Centric Systems Architecture  

Feel free to check them out when you have a moment- your comments are much appreciated! 

Sincerely,

MIKE2.0 Community  

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There are many similar challenges that data warehouse designers face on every project. For instance two challenges we are often called upon to decide how to handle changes to source system models and the proper handling of changes to reference and master data.

The former is usually handled by splitting logical entities when creating physical tables separating attributes and relationships that have a higher probability of changing. The latter is commonly handled in one of three ways. Method one sees non volatile and volatile attributes are split into two tables (with a one to many relationship) Method two has the current attribute values are held in one table with changes over time maintained in a second table (again one to many). Finally, method three has changes across a number of concepts tracked in an audit table which is only intended for forensic purposes.

On recent data warehouse projects, we are using a variant of method one that has been formalised as “The Data Vault”.  The Data Vault techniques put forward by Dan Linstedt formalises both of these issues and makes sensible design recommendations. In particular, it adopts an approach using “hub”, “link” and “satellite” tables.

Originally, Linstedt attempted to patent these concepts, but this application was rejected and he has now adopted a free approach and is promoting his concepts through books, training and his web site: http://www.danlinstedt.com/