Well in today's Globe, Sondra Gotlieb doesn't get the purpose of a Blackberry & Facebook. And all I can think is that poor dinosaur just can't see the end coming. To extend the metaphor her iceage is the Internet.

And then I started thinking about Harvey Gellman. My first PDA was a clamshell HP 8300 followed closely by a palmpilot, then another HP Windows based device. The reason I think of Harvey is because he and used to play this little game. At the end of a meeting we would arrange to meet again. I'd pull out my PDA and fumble around with it trying to enter the time of our next meeting into the calendar. I'd be half way through this little exercise and Harvey would say "I'm done" because he'd finished pencilling me into his pocket calendar. His calendar being a chequebook sized, pocketable, paperbased system that served him just fine.

Harvey passed away 7 years ago this coming April. In the mean time I've gone through three or four PDAs. While the technologies come a long way in these 7 years I still think I'd loose our little game.

That's why I need the iPad. Maybe it will give me the edge and I'll win the game with Harvey.

Blog posted here.

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By focusing on our clients’ objectives and best interests we are able to work collaboratively to drive Business Value through Rapid Results.

Our team of experienced professionals works along side our customers using an integrated delivery model, which allows us to tailor our approach to the individual needs of an engagement. From strategy through to execution, we work with our clients to achieve results in a quick and cost effective manner.

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Our clients’ see us as a friendly and approachable firm whose people will work with them to meet their objectives. Some of our past success has been in the areas of Telecom, Financial Services, Retail and Manufacturing where together we have worked to achieve great results.

Reports to:  Vice President of Consulting

General responsibilities:

Business Systems Analysts reporting to the project manager will work with the end business primes and the technology teams to understand and document source systems data models, document data and workflows for operations and applications.  Ensuring that the proper level of understanding of the requirements can create the understanding required for the technical teams to do their designs.  The Business System Analyst will also provide continuity of support through the development phase and work with the business primes in the testing phases.

• Ability to quickly understand the business issues and data challenges of client's organization and industry
• Ability to extract client requirements using business analysis techniques
• • Ability to facilitate both team and client meetings
  • Agile and Waterfall methods
• Perform gap analysis against business requirements
• Develop specifications for each of the reporting data marts. 
• Gather and the requirements for all reports and queries that are part of the overall package.
• Create detailed business and functional requirements documents and own document updates and reviews throughout the project lifecycle
• Lead testing initiative:  create test plan, test scenarios and test data
• Ensures issues are identified, tracked, reported on and resolved in a timely manner, being the voice of the business requirements

Skills/Experience:

• Soft
• • Excellent interpersonal and client relationship skills
  • A demonstrated ability to interact with a variety of end-users and business clients
  • Possesses understanding in the areas of BI reporting and database and system design
  • Strong analytical and problem solving capability with excellent attention to detail
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  • Practical approach vs. theoretical knowledge

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  • Strong data and process modeling and analysis skills gained on Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence projects

• Education and Communication
• • Excellent English communication skills - both written & verbal.  Bilingual in French a definite asset.
  • Post secondary Degree - preferably Bachelor's degree in Business Administration, Computer Science/Engineering or equivalent combination of education & work experience.

What we Offer:

• Challenging assignments using the latest BI/DW tools
• An opportunity to innovate
• Colleagues who are passionate about delivering great projects
• Compensation commemorate with experience and skills

About a month later we got another bill with delinquency charges on the bill.  We called up again and was connected with the fraud group.  They said it was not fraud it was a mistake.  A person was at the store in this place and did not have the card so gave the last four digits of the social security number and an account popped up.  As background, we are from Canada and we have a Social Insurance Number and my wife had to give this to get her credit card.   The last four digits on my wife's card was the same as this person''s four digits on the social security number.   Eventually it was all cleared up but I am willing to bet this problem will affect my wife's credit rating.

So here we have a data quality issue which becomes a business issue because we will think twice about shopping in that store again.  How many of these customer service problem are causing people to go somewhere else to shop?  The most precious commodity of every business is their customers and how quickly they lose our trust.

Another data security issue is that, in Canada, a business cannot use our Social Insurance Number as a means of identifying us.  The only people who can use it are the tax people and the social security people.   Interesting how anybody can ask for your SSN in the United States.  

I wonder how often in all our businesses, data quality becomes a customer service issue.   

Hmmm.  I guess as MIP suggested we need to kill this a little harder and not have the computer and blackberry with me.  I did notice I used it less, but really missed my twitter stream and finding out what was going on.

Let's try again next weekend :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne6tB2KiZuk&feature=player_embedded

I am interested and paticipate in choral music and this is really a neat demonstration that scale is something that comes natural to us all.  I think it is a most curious thing about music. 

So this does come back to people and how they work together.  So if our people are always working with clients all over the place, how do they end up coming back and focusing on being a part of a larger whole.  It is easy to go native and really be tighter with the client than your organization.  This is where we need to find ways to create the glue that reminds and builds the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

I was reading a great series by Bill Ives that I found very provoking and was in part trying to deal with this issue.  It is a six part blog that overviews Booz-Allen's embracing Enterprise 2.0.

Everyone who works for or owns a consulting should read the series as it has some great insight and a couple of great lessons at the expense of Booz-Allen.

Over the next couple of weeks I will add some of my thoughts in parallel to the ideas that Bill shares in this series.  Thanks Bill for pulling this together.

After a comment from a client where she was complaining about always working 7 days a week, I realized that there is some merit in this.  I know that Graham used to have a rule, no working on Friday nights.  This worked most of the time, but when we do a deployment on a Friday that often does not work.  I realized that over time he lost that ability all together.

So it made me ponder, how do we get our weekends back?  I think it is time to have a forced, everyone in the company take this weekend off and no looking at emails, working on computers or conference calls.

So those in the company who read the blog will know that this weekend I dictate as of 5pm on Friday, no work until 9am on Monday no matter what.

I took some time today to try and reflect on some insights that I gleemed over the past several weeks.  It was very heartening.  As we know the most difficult times bring the best opportunity for challenge and learning.  I believe in this whole heartedly.

In looking at balance though, having a constant level of challenge is good, but if it is always at a spinal tap level of 11 for a long period of time, this can really effect other areas of your life.  This why working to take a balanced view of our life is crucial.

It does no-one any good if we get through the challenges at work to the detriment of our health or family.  I strongly suggest we leverage this kind of process in a world of 7/24 always on.

Of course data quality is a business issue but that does not mean that IT is not intimately involved.  Often the business rules specified by the business are not impemented correctly and sometimes the data validation routines are incorrect.  There are numerous other examples, but in the end the business must make sure that these errors are corrected by IT.  Often these errors do not show up during testing but later when the application is being used.

Often the phrase that data quality is a business issue is interpreted as IT not acknowledging their role.  Nothing could be further from the truth and the business must work with IT to correct the data quality issue.  Often the responsibility is shared and must be resolved by the groups working together to resolve some very complex data definitions and business rules.  Effective data governance is an effective team effort with everybody working together to deal with issues rather than placing blame or pointing fingers.

Anyway it was covered on CFTO in Toronto during the Olympics and was on after the Canadian's won gold which would have been great.

So the following is the commercial that White Pine Productions put together...

In thinking of this I realized that it was time to get a refresher on all the items and the process to ensure I am not cheating myself.  So I have asked Michael to work with me again to help me refresh the process to ensure that I can give this the proper approach.

I think that in so doing work will be better, but more importantly I will se how I balance off the other roles I play like: Dad, son, husband, friend, uncle, member of the community, employee, employer, and the list goes on.

A great opportunity for introspection.

Not bad data in the sense of EDW and BI, but the Metadata or context around some work we are doing and are having challenges with.  The reason I decided to call it a metadata issue was that a bunch of us could talk about the issues, but none of us had the same story or answer.  This is very similar to a datawarehousing project where we will have data, but not context and spin our wheels as we start to consume the data for our uses and hopefully action.

I found in the past that if you get some good context to the data then coming up with the actions to resolve the issue are simpler to work on.  So sometimes it is worth the time to call and discuss and when you do look for the context and capture the metadata

I must give Robert Seiner some credit for these ideas because has written some excellent material on this subject.  You can see his work at www.tdan.com

Data Stewardship is the formalization of accountability for the management of data resources.

I have asked several people on various projects recently if they knew who the owner of various data resources was on their projects and with a little thought each one said yes.  These people are the informal data stewards and our thesis is that they should be recognized formally and explained their role.  A role they are already fulfilling on an informal basis.

The next step is to create metadata for the data steward which contains the names of the stewards and the data they steward.  Seiner calls this the Stewardship Repository.  In addition the responsibility should be written in their job description.  This action simply formalizes an activity they already do.

The great news is that we now know the answer to the question "Who owns the data?"  We then know who to go to if we have questions about the data and its status.  I bet everybody in the data warehousing business would welcome a place to go to find out who owns what data. 

My suggestions is that early on in every project the Business Analyst be assigned the responsibility of adding to the Stewardship Repository.  I am sure its existence would save the Business Analysts a significant of time.

This is the first step in data stewardship but a really important and relatively simple step.  I invite your comments. 

The challenge with the word collaboration is that often it is just talk.  I have had the opportunity to work with someone who knew how to collaborate.  He is also a Lean Six Sigma guy and that doesn't hurt either.  It was a real pleasure.  We had some bumps coming up with common frameworks, we are both type A personalities and that was often fun.

But after about 1 week I really felt he was a collaborative partner.  We got to a comfort level I felt that allowed for often open or frank discussion that hopefully he would agree that neither of us used to our advantage when things got tough.

Exit that phase in the project/program and we had new people come in.  Sadly we can not get past the 'Just Talk' phase of collaboration.  This is tell me what I need to do, I will do it and then throw whatever back at you.  Sadly not even jumping back onto our collaboration platform helped us break through.  I just did an audit of the collaboration environment and there is nothing there.

Funny how we are spinning.  Less talk, Way less oversight meetings and lets get together and do it.

Pink says only intrinsic motivation works for complex tasks and I guess entering golf scores must fall into that category.  The key to intrinsic motivation according to Pink are autonomy, mastery and purpose.  So let's see how I can apply the principle to entering golf scores.

Let me give a little background for non-golfers.  In order for people of different abilities to compete against other, golf has a system that takes your scores and creates a number that you subtract from your score so that on average you all will shot the same score.  So a poorer golfer having a good day will beat a god golfer having a bad day.  The system works if everybody enters their scores into the handicap computer.

There seems to tow kinds of people who do not put their scores in the computer.  People who want to have a low handicap and do not put in bad scores and people who want to have a high handicap so do not put in low scores.  The other group may be just lazy and "forget" to put in scores.  External penalties do not work for any length of time and require a lot of work so I want to find another way.

I think I will give them autonomy by telling them it is their choice to enter scores and they can decide if the want to play by the rules in this game that depends on peoples honor.  I will explain the purpose of the handicap system and the concept of making competition between players of unequal ability fair.  Then explain that a measure of their mastery of the game is their handicap, not individual scores.  If they are not putting in all their scores they are not honestly measuring their level of mastery. 

The other purpose that I can present is being fair to their team mates and competitors.

I think that covers the principles that Pink present.  If you want to read more about Drive and Motivation 3.0, see http://www.danpink.com/drive

I would like some reaction to my dilemma and thoughts.

One of the key responsibilities of the IT folks and the business is to maintain an open dialog on issues.  The challenge for the IT folks is to express the issues in plain language as opposed to talking to IT speak.  IT folks have a great tendency to talk in slang and short forms because they get tired of repeating the same words over and over again.  I think it is the responsibility of the business people to call them on this whenever it is used. 

In addition to the obvious reason of understanding each other, sometimes the IT folks often do not know the meanings of some of the terms they use.  Another thing is that some words lose their meaning through overuse.  For example, the word "system" really does not have a very specific meaning any more.  Let me give you other examples: program, software, web 1.0, web 2.0, SOA, and on and on.  However often the business people do the same thing.  Some of the worst offender are the defense, the aerospace and telecommunication industries.  These groups use so many short forms one would swear they are speaking another language. 

I am emphasizing this understanding as being important because I think it is key for effective data governance.   I will continue developing ideas on governance in future blogs. 

As we chatted, I realized based on some work Michael had done at a client (I asked some good probing questions), that this was just as much about bandwidth utilization as productivity.  As we talked I highlighted:

1. In today's world, people will move to smartphones if they want to really get on facebook
2. In some cases, if you see someone having facebook open all day, does not mean they are on it all day.  Often, the next generation uses this like I use email/outlook.  So not necessarily a good measurement.
3. Productivity is often abused, and social media is just the next tool to give people the opportunity.
4. Bandwidth utilization can mean that instead of stopping it, move it to a low cost, low bandwidth pipe and off the corporate communication network.

It was funny though, with all the conversation, he never thought about leveraging this interest in the social media to take it as an opportunity for his business.  He is a prime, customer facing organization that probably spends a good amount of money on print and nothing online.  He has some people in his office that understand part of the paradigm, now harness it.

Man it was a fun conversation.

...pharmaceutical companies to get value from all that data, there needs to be a robust business intelligence layer that sits atop a very robust enterprise data warehouse (EDW) infrastructure....

What is important to add is that while our approach at Project X allows for companies to effectively overcome the pitfalls and realize value, there is an important nuance to take away from that statement.  The word is used is effectively.  I didn't use the word easily.  That is an important difference.  While it seems straightforward, the execution of a BI initiative needs to be managed effectively.  It isn't always easy.  It takes purposeful approaches within governance, requirements capturing, design, development, testing and deployment.  The shifting, exploratory nature of BI initiatives can easily through a project team into "spin-mode" and cause the project to enter a cycle of de-scoping & disappointment.  By partnering for an organization that employs an agile "sprint-like" approach, companies within the pharmaceutical vertical will be able to transform their data and then "they can then move on to insight."

To read my original post, feel free to click here.

When talking to the participants in the incident at hand it was very interesting to see the context and nature of the impact the conversations that happened.  Here are my observations:

1. All the kids stories aligned - though each had gaps in what they saw happening
2. The kids took away Ownership of the situation - though the situation was complex, somewhere in the questions or educating the school did, the kids took away that they were culpable in the situation.
3. As a parent talking to your own kid does not give you the correct picture due to the words they will use to describe the situation.

My experience is more around setting up security at the user and application layer.  Security filters and access list allow the users to view the data they are authorized to review and at a specific level.

I looked on the MicroStrategy site to see if they had any good information on security.  Its high level but explains the different levels:

There are four main architectural layers that must be completely secure: user layer, transmission layer, application layer and data layer.

• User layer: Users must be authenticated and authorized to access data.
• Transmission layer: Data transmission must be secured and hacker-proof.
• Application layer: Only appropriate application functionality should be provided to users with associated privileges.
• Data layer: Users must have access only to data for which they have appropriate privileges.

MicroStrategy's security architecture implements tight security at every layer.

Robust Security Functionality: To ensure robust security, MicroStrategy implements industry-leading security measures at every layer of the architecture.

Some examples for each layer include:

• User layer: integration with NT and LDAP security.
• Transmission layer: 128-bit SSL transmission, 128-bit encryption of data, multiple firewall (DMZ) configuration with no database connection on web server.
• Application layer: 3-tier security system encompassing privileges, access control and security profiles.
• Data layer: security filters and database views, revolutionary connection mapping."

My experience is more around setting up security at the user and application layer.  Security filters and access list allow the users to view the data they are authorized to review and at a specific level.