aspiring tendencies in information management
TRANSCRIPT
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Aspiring Tendencies in
Information ManagementData Warehousing and Decision Support
Martyn Richard Jones-Lovering
2012
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Aspiring Tendencies in Information Management 2012 2
Foreword
This whitepaper is one of a series offered bycambriano energiaas a service to our client and associate
network.
This paper addresses a wide range of topics in information management, and in particular topics
that are important to strategic Data Warehousing and Decision Support (business intelligence, data
analytics, and data mining and visual representation)
Whilst intentionally ironic, polemic and provocative, the purpose of this document is serious. There
are justifiable trepidations, doubts and frustrations; concerns for the wellbeing of Information
Management; initial fears that anything can be done to remedy its flaws, shortcomings and insidious
influences; accompanied by the perception that IM is being appropriated by dogma, fantasists andopportunists.
This paper came into being as a means to discuss the issues of dereliction, deception and
inexperience in Information Management, to restate that IM is a useful, valuable and timely
organisational discipline, and to inform organisational IM strategies going forward.
For more than a decade Information Management in general and Data Warehousing and Business
Intelligence in particular have been ripe for a wake-up call.
The need for clarity, integrity and rectitude has reached levels that are intellectually impossible to
ignore without further destroying the credibility of Data Warehousing and Decision Support. IfInformation Management experts and professionals do nothing to clean up IMs act, we will only
have ourselves to blame. If we work on this problem together; strategically, coherently and with
determination, then the rewards will come.
The proposition is that we reclaim professionalism, coherence and veracity for Information
Management, and that we are resolute and tenacious in our attempt to claw back more than a
semblance of competence, lucidity and integrity.
So, without more ado, here is a selection of motivational, partisan and polemic sketches indicating
what, in my humble opinion, should be done to address some of the more prescient, pertinent and
aspiring questions in Information Management.
Martyn Richard Jones-Lovering
Bamberg, January 2012
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Contents
INTRODUCTION 4
1. STRENGTH AND INNOCENCE 6
2. THE CONTRIBUTION DEFICIT 7
3. REHABILITATING DW 8
4. VISIBLY DECISIVE BI 9
5. EVOLVING RATIONAL DESIGN 10
6. DATA INTEGRATION FOR ADULTS 11
7. EXCLUSIVE TANGIBILITY FETISH 12
8. INFORMED PEDAGOGY 13
9. UTILITY, TIME AND PLACE 14
10. EMINENT HISTORIES 15
11. PHILOSOPHY OF INFORMATION 16
12. FALSE GREENING OF IM 17
AFTERTHOUGHTS
ACRONYMS
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Introduction
For decades, organisations have been moving away from traditional function-based business
structures, with their attendant silos of competence, overlapping roles and artificially limited
responsibilities, to highly focused business-driven process models.
Today, we recognise that well-bounded business process reengineering is a critical success factor in
contemporary business strategies, and new ways of looking at processes are being explored and
introduced in order to bring about far greater levels of simplicity, improvements in supplied service
and in continuous advances in product quality. This has also lead to new-found process robustness,
greater customer intensity and intimacy, and sea-change improvements in the ways that forward-
looking organizations do business.
As part of this information trend, organisations are transitioning to service-oriented business-process
operating platforms. These new platforms can be used to capture and store a wide range of data,
way above and beyond legacy in-house applications and 3rd party applications, such as traditional
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).
New levels of process abstraction mean that businesses can essentially record every step, state and
decision point in a business process flow, from initiation to closure, which allows organisations to
closely monitor business activity, service levels and indicators right down to the finest level of
granularity and across the entire business landscape. Businesses can now look at who does what,
when, where, and how, which allows for more focused questions to be asked, the accurate
pinpointing of process hotspots and process bottlenecks, and the initiation of more concentrated
corrective measures.
The separation of operational support and strategic decision support is being blurred. Suddenly
senior management can really have their finger on the business pulse; the modelling of the digital
nervous system now promises to become a reality, and we are moving boldly forward into the
realms of business intelligence that will not only tell companies what they have done wrong in the
past but will support decision-makers in formulating endearing and persuasive strategies for the
future of organizations. What senior executive could possibly turn down the opportunity to be on
top of all the key aspects of the business that they are responsible for?
Well, thats the theory, now get prepared to meet the reality.
There are twelve main sections to this whitepaper; each one represents a topic of which we basicallyask: i) where do we want to go, ii) where are we at now, and iii) how can we try and get to where we
need to be:
1. This is a brief look at how ignorance and hubris is tormenting the InformationManagement profession.
2. In which we contemplate the idea that some IT organisations have been a continuous let-down, who time and time again have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory; whilst
lamenting their bad luck, their misfortune and the utter unfairness of it all.
3. Lets take another great initiative and remake it in our image arguing that we shouldreclaim the kind of data warehousing that actually benefits organisations that actually want
to use it.
4. Getting BI right amidst a shark-pool of charlatans, snake oil merchants and thaumaturgy.
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5. How to overcome the damage that slash and burn raiders have done to the evolving datawarehouse paradigm.
6. When data integration initiatives go wrong; again, again and again.7. When tangibles are not enough, and when the nonsense gets too much.8. How to evolve an educated profession, allure suitable candidates and provide continuous
education9. Answering the question of who does what, where and why? Thinking globally,
benefitting locally.
10. Quality in data, for data and with data. Touching on the finer dimensions of data quality.11. Thinking of Information. The time and place for best principles, proven practices, data
models and process models, structures, reference architectures and methodologies.
12.The false greening of IM. From trash to treasures; everything indexed, everyone connectedand everything on.
Information Technology in general and Information Management in particular have come to
represent an obnoxious facet of mercenary and predatory behaviour.
Earned income should go hand on hand with a good job, done well; the market success of an
excellent product sold at an affordable price; and, just rewards for a project well thought out,
planned, executed and delivered. It shouldnt be pile it high, mark it up, maximise profits, rip-off
the customers (until they get to like it, then do it even more), sell overpriced crap that people dont
need, and to hell with the outcomes and the deliverables.Getting companies hooked on bad technology is like getting people hooked on drugs, or corporates
hooked on bad strategy, and the DW and Decision Support market has been flooded with
technology crack.
Take a simple example. Once a new tech user opens up a revenue stream for one of the dealers,that revenue stream will just get bigger and bigger until someone decides to cut the flow, go into
rehabilitation or to simply move to another dealer.
But, thats more than enough of an introduction. The following sections are written to incite
thought, discussion and discourse. But more than anything else, they were written like the best of
Data Warehousing and Decision Support to stimulate and incite leadership and management
action.
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1.Strength and InnocenceAnger is the enemy of nonviolence and pride is a monster that swallows it up.
Mohandas GandhiAspirational trends
The predominance of strength and innocence, better known as ignorance and arrogance, is
undermining Information Management, and in turn is ensuring that many Data Warehousing and
Decision Support initiatives are disappointments.
2012 will give IM professionals the opportunity to regain some dignity and professional integrity.
First, by recognizing that there are grave problems within IM; then slowing down and halting the
toxic trends, carelessness and bad practices; and subsequently, reversing, through intelligence,
perseverance and integrity, the ingenuous and decrepit habits that trouble the profession.
Present indications
In the rush to the bottom we throw excellence in analysis, architecture, engineering and business
understanding, under the bus. In IM as well as in many other branches of IT (Information
Technology), mediocrity has become the new excellent, regular the new exceptional, and
shoddiness the new normal.
Whether it is in Data Warehousing, Decision Support or Data Integration, we see that professional
integrity and ethical behaviour already enough of a rarity in IT - is being repeatedly trumped by
short-term expediency, wilful witlessness, and the cultivation and perpetuation of dogmas,dysfunctional behaviour and dubious doings.
The Information Management sector is rife with elaborate charlatanry, partisan expediency and
wilful self-deception. There is not a day that goes by in which we are not submitted to an avalanche
of contemptible claims from rogue IM evangelists, DW neophytes and unsophisticated
opportunists, who chose to simplymake things up as they go along.
Manifest requisites
It is in the best interests of IM to raise the profession out of the ditch; to reform the profession
from the inside; to drive sea-change improvements in knowledge, quality and professional integrity;to ensure a drastic reduction in destructive hype, deception and dogma, and, to show the artless
charlatans, chancers and snake-oil merchants the door.
Data Warehousing and Decision Support - if done right, and for the right reasons - can deliver
tangible benefits to many organisations. Simply stated, if business information has a value in the
realm of business and strategy then it should be treated as an asset, if it is an asset then it should be
managed and nurtured as such, which means aiming to do the right thing right, first time, every
time, whilst focusing on maximising confidence, availability and agility.
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2.The Contribution DeficitWe can spend our whole lives underachieving.
Phil CrosbyAspirational trends
2012 should be a year in which hard-nosed reassessment are made of what exactly Data
Warehousing and Decision Support mean, and more to the point, what is the difference between a
Data Warehouse and the corporate data equivalent of a junk shop full of fake junk.
2012 should be the year in which DW and Decision Support are freed from the deep-rooted
dysfunction of far too many IT shops.
Present indications
IT has spent more than four decades in knowingly perfecting the inability to understand the needs
of business.
Many IT organisations have manifestly failed to understand data warehousing and decision support.
Many IT organisations do not even bother to gain a perfunctory grasp of DW, assuming that two
and a half ideas and a generous budget is enough. This is still a sizeable tendency within IT.
Many IT organisations are so averse to the needs of business that they become self-fulfilling
prophecies in isolation, marginalisation and alienation. Many Data Warehouses are built without
any deference to the business, and people wonder why these pre-emptive initiatives are always
disasters.
Many IT organisations are reacting to criticism by shifting the responsibility for much of IT to third
party suppliers and the low-cost vendors, who, whilst not being able to provide the competence or
the quality, do so at a margin of the price; even if the economics make absolutely no business sense
at all.
Manifest requisites
Its time that CEOs woke up to the way IT takes great and proven ideas, and then kills them;awoken to the IT Contribution Deficit; to the dismal history of corporate IT, to the vagaries and
vices of technology, and told what really can be done, why it might be done, and who can really
provide value, benefits and answers.
IM professionals should be in the vanguard of change in the way that senior managers view DW.
Its time that people stopped selling out the best principles and practices of DW in order to turn a
fast buck, and took more interest in establishing professional integrity within the realm of
Information Management.
DW professionals should show courage and empathy as well as intelligence and conviction in
recovering the business of IM for the benefit of organisations and especially for all the people who
have a stake in them.
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3.Rehabilitating DWNo legacy is so rich as honesty.
Will iam ShakespeareAspirational trends
This is the year in which IM professional reclaim the principles of well architected and well-
engineered data warehousing based on sound information management principles and driven by
clear business imperatives.
Data Warehousing is going through an evolutionary process, with DW 2.0 and the management of
unstructured data leading the way. New developments in the scope and reach of DW will ensure a
solid framework for the next generation of organisational data warehousing. In this respect, DW
2.0 continues to be a solid basis for successful DW, DSS and KM projects aimed at meetingevolving and maturing business requirements for actionable data and decision support.
Present indications
If electrical engineering were DW, then recognition of a Philips screwdriver would be the unique
requirement for admission into the EEEI. Fortunately for that august institution this is not the
case, but for professional DW practitioners, thats how bad it has become.
Designing a star schema and building a data mart is not data warehousing, doing thistwenty times or more, is not data warehousing.
Dumping data in a quiet area for people to run reports against is not data warehousing. Putting big data onto a cloud and allowing unstructured queries to run against that
unstructured data, is not data warehousing.
Many people who have an opinion about data warehousing dont actually have anyknowledge and experience of working on successful data warehouse implementations.
Manifest requisites
Its time to get back to basics (subject oriented; integrated; time-variant, non-volatile; iterative;
support for strategic decision making, etc.) and its time to get up to speed with the "architecture
for the next generation of data warehousing" DW 2.0TM1, including the recognition of the lifecycleof data within the data warehouse; the incorporation of unstructured data along with structured
data; the correct capture and positioning of Metadata locally and globally; Master Data
Management; and, the need for integrity of integrateddataand the need forOLTPdata.
Its time to take back DW, and disassociate the term from each and every cowboy project and each
and every unskilled bodger. Its about time that the charlatans of DW were given the red card, and
sent to an early bath. Its about time that DW was given a makeover and recovered from the
clutches of the willfully gormless and the craven.
1 DW 2.0 is a trademark of Bill Inmon
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4.Visibly Decisive BI"It's not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are."
Roy DisneyAspirational trends
In 2012, the world will wake up to the fact that BI is more than just seeing your data on a
dashboard or in a report, and that BI is about more than just finding 1,001 ways of slicing and
dicing data, or about playing with your pie charts, drill-downs and pop-ups in the shower - on the
move or in the rest room of the Dorchester - but that it is essentially about Decision Support.. DS
which includes, but is not limited to: quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis, predictive analytics,
situational analytics, intelligent explanation, knowledge management, data mining, data visualisation,
corporate performance management and elements of complex event processing.
Present indications
One of the problems with BI, as with many aspects of IT, is that it tends to appear with a strong
odour of arrogance and ignorance. How IT has the brass neck to tell business that BI will help
them do a better job, make better decisions or get it right has never failed to astound,
especially considering what an underwhelming success that business IM has been over the last two
decades.
The world of BI in 2011 was marked by an elephantine surge in marketing hype and invective.
Witless evangelists of inedible BI dog food crowded the professional social networking scene,
heaping one absurd claim on top of another. Claims and counterclaims flew like so much detritushitting the fan, and yet, in this perpetually autistic corner of IT, very few seemed to really want to
address the fundamental needs of business.
Throughout 2011, companies continued to be suckered by what amounts to little better than
business oriented vacuous tosh that focused on the retentive needs of amateurs and the collusion of
the powerful, contented and wilfully insentient. For as harsh, polemic and abrasive the comments
may be, the facts are there, as large as life, to support the observations.
Manifest requisites
In the spring of 2012 we may come to realise that BI is essentially about decision support. In the
summer of 2012 we may come to realise that the best place for strategic advice on business
intelligence is not to be found on unmoderatedopen social or professional forums or with tool
vendors, but, with people who have a record of success in DW and Decision Support.
The job of IM, like the job of IT, should be to assist the people in the enterprise in achieving its
strategic, tactical and operational objectives; of contributing the alignment of strategy and prevailing
forces; of managing the balancing act between needs, quality and resources; of identifying new
opportunities in all potential and new areas, and of consolidating what needs to be consolidated.
IM should be a major weapon in the decision makers toolbox, but no one should pretend that the
tool is the decision maker or that the tool will lead to better decisions, but instead could lead to
better informed decisions and to richer avenues of exploration.
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5.Evolving Rational DesignA superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions.
ConfuciusAspirational trends
2012 is the year in which we rediscover the need to be able to warehouse not only highly structured
data, but far more complex structured, some of which is so complex in structure and semantics that
it is easier to label in laypersons terms as unstructured data.
In order to extend data warehousing into the realms of coherent explanation and knowledge
management, the industry will embrace the content and concepts of DW 2.0, and link highly
structured data directly to highly reusable unstructured data.
Present indications
One of the malignant trends in more than twenty years of Data Warehousing has been the way that
this well architected and practical answer to the decision support needs of organisations has been
continually subject to misinterpretation, misalignment and misattribution.
Individual and commercial expediency crashed landed onto the DW bandwagon in the hope of
benefitting from an already moving trend. The DW paradigm was hacked-up in order to try and fit
selective parts of it into peoples preconceived ideas of what reporting databases should look like.
DW became what anyone wanted it to be; a dumping ground for data, a data mart, ten data marts, a
host of data siloes; 20 terabytes and not a byte of intelligence; it was anything goes, and it did.
It didnt matter that a Data Warehouse was not subject oriented, or that the data was integrated or
cleaned, or that the data retained could not be used to reproduce accurate snapshots over time, or
that the database was volatile. For many, it was enough to simply apply a new label, and their data
doghouse would be turned as if by magic - into a fully-fledged data warehouse.
Manifest requisites
Industry analysts such as Gartner Group and Forest Rim Technology estimate that over 80 per cent
of corporate data can be considered unstructured. This unstructured data includes emails,
voicemails, search engine data, Microsoft Office suite documents (Excel, PowerPoint, OneNoteand Word) and many other formats that are not kept in traditional database systems.
2012 will see the strong upward trend in demand for unstructured text processing tools and
techniques, as more and more organisations begin to understand the potentially rich seams of
valuable information that has previously remained untapped and locked within complex or
unstructured data.
As an aside, in the field of comprehensive risk management, cambriano energa is advancing its
research and development in areas of contextual explanation as well as carrying out investigation
into leveraging the KM with DW 2.0.
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6.Data Integration for AdultsWhy, a four year old child could understand this. Run out and get me a four year old child
Groucho M arx Aspirational trends
2012 will be the year in which even the most obtuse of IT organisations will gradually begin to
understand that there is a substantial difference between data integration and enterprise
application integration; data migration; data transformation; data replication; and, a bolli-stoli.
Present indications
When it comes to data integration, many corporations are more permissive and irresponsible with
data than some people are with well, there are many valid comparisons.
Why are companies content to go on working with dirty data? Well, the truth is that they arent. But
in many companies, this dirty little data secret is kept a secret by well, guess who? Does the
acronym IT ring a bell?
Another blind-side of many corporations, some of them quite large, is that their IT departments
refuse to recognise the move from old fashioned batch processing and near-batch time transaction
management to a situation where corporate transaction and message data will flow in near real-time
mode.
What is one of the first things that IT departments do when they hear the term Data Integration apart from rushing to goggle it? Thats right. Many IT departments consider Data integration to be
synonymous with ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Loading), and even more curious, that
anything ETL must necessarily be data integration, data warehousing or manna from heaven.
In many instances data integration initiatives are embraced with little understanding of what is
actually involved in data integration, and with scant or no regard for data governance. Many IT
organisations cover up their ignorance and arrogance when it comes to data integration with weasel
words such as data integration is different here, our data integration needs are different and
we dont use the same terminology.
Manifest requisites
A coherent, cohesive and comprehensive data integration competence should be a part of the
strategy of any business that relies on data to gain, retain and sustain business with its clients and
preferred suppliers.
Enterprise Data Warehousing is one pillar of a comprehensive strategy for corporate data
integration, along with other key data integration elements, such as Master Data Management, Meta
data management, Customer and Product data integration, corporate data quality assurance and
corporate data governance.
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7.Exclusive Tangibility FetishThe novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last.
George B ernard Shaw Aspirational trends
2012 will be the year in which more and more people will come to the realisation that technology
alone is not the answer to the needs of Data Warehousing and Decision Support.
2012 will be the year in which the major vendors stop touting their technology as if was a universal
panacea for all Data Warehousing and Decision Support needs.
Present indications
Tools are tangible and intelligence is not, and people have an interest in ensuring that the two are
tangled. The point is not that people understand DW and apply it; the point is to sell it.
If professional soccer were like DW we would be informed that its not the knowledge, skills and
effort of great players and teams that count, but the boots. This is what we do in IM, Never mind
the team, just take a look at those boots! How many people have responded to the DW equivalent
of we play Chelsea next week, any tips? with buy adidas, push the envelope or flip a
Frisbee?
If health care systems in any modern state were run like IM, malpractice lawsuits would be piled
high; there would be no diagnosis, prognosis or prescriptions; and people would be mistreated.
Simply stated, DW is awash in a sea of nonsense. Much of DW is baloney promoted by vendors,
perpetuated by the misinformed, prostituted by artless product /service evangelists, and consumed
by the nave and lazy. Its not their fault, they know no better. But, its still toxic and malignant
nonsense, and it HAS TO GO!
At the services end of the spectrum, answers are even more fast, flatulent and bizarre. Cries go up,
put it in the cloud, get big data, virtualise it, socialise it, star schema with circled cubes.
In the midst of all the chattering, foolishness and tat, there is a dissolute group of opportunists.
They dont have a clue about the significance of their slogans, the business that they pretend to be
in, or of the businesses that they pretend to help.
The IM meltdown was to be expected; its a side-effect of the system of vacant, of 24/7/52
foolishness to go, of thrilling labels stuck on tat. Whats it all about? Let me see yeah, got it big
cloud, big data, big SaaS, bigboom banga bang on a networking string
Manifest requisites
2012 will herald the beginning of the end of the road for the degradation of DW. People will get
wiser to outrageous claims and crass ignorance. Coherence will be mandatory, visible benefits will
be demanded, visible progress will be required, tangible results will be required. Companies
operating in the DW and Decision Support spaces will either revolutionise their act or leave thestage.
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8.Informed Pedagogy"There is no treasure like knowledge."
Imam AliAspirational trends
In 2012, we will start to treat the Information Management profession with greater respect. This
will be reflected in how we identify, allure, hire, educate and motivate potential Information
Management professionals, and how we ensure continuous learning opportunities.
To use another footballing analogy, trainee IM professionals should be fielded when they are ready,
they should only play in leagues that correspond to their talent, and should only be placed in
positions that they are capable of playing in. This does not mean that a trainee must play as well as
the top players in that position, but they must possess a reasonable level of competence, potentialand aptitude, even if the well-honed skills and deep experience are lacking. Moreover, a player will
always have something more to learn, and something more to impart.
Present indications
Outsourced, offshored and exploitative body shopping has destroyed the best laid plans of people
and projects.
Information Management requires people skills, social skills, an ability to communicate and a
superb ability to active.ly listen. These traits are markedly absent from contemporary information
management, and especially amongst people who are thrown into the deep end of the business,because they are cheap and can be bullied to say and do practically anything no matter how
rubbish the outcomes are, or how duplicitous the aim is.
Manifest requisites
In 2012, with the support of the USA, Brazil, Russia, the EU and China, etc. we in IM would be a
wise to establish an international Information Management Institute, which would be charged with
establishing, maintaining and continually improving professional standards in Information
Management. This institute would receive its funding through sponsorship by customers (through
industry) and tax payers (through government), and it would be charged with creating, evolving and
ensuring standards for IM, of certifying IM professionals and of maintaining a list of qualified IM
practitioners. However, its guidance would come from an elected body of experts who would
make up the governing body. In addition, it would be have the legal basis for providing arbitration
in cases of malpractice claims against individuals and organisations.
The Information Management Institute would provide excellence in IM education, from the basic
and essential skills of how to effectively listen; how to communicate; how to arrive at consensus
and understanding how to empathise; to the high end goal of providing master classes in best
principles in Information Management.
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9.Utility, Time and PlaceThe essence of tyranny is the denial of complexity"
Jacob BurkhardtAspirational trends
We live with what we have, but we also try to avoid stagnation, to improve, and to advance. Each
and every one of us is here because we are part of a long line of survivors, and todays crisis ridden
business world is mainly about survival.
2012 will see organisations investing in the cultivation of local talent, local competence and local
expertise. In 2012 we will realise that certain market dogmas must be trash-canned, before the
potentially disastrous becomes the inevitable.
Present indications
One of the biggest and destructive deceits in the history of Information Management is that IM is
being outsourced and offshored primarily because there are simply not enough or not any local
skills to keep up with burgeoning demand. After many years of following these claims, they have
been found to be frequently and woefully lacking in rigour and honesty.
I once heard Michael Schrage2 discuss an encounter with IT bosses in which he related an anecdote
from his days as a writer. He talked about editors who wanted pieces to be short and succinct, but
who would pay by the word. The connection was made between words of an article and lines of
code, the bottom line being that companies wanted lean code but would insist on paying forapplications based on the number of lines of code written. A few things of note:
1. The corruption of the organization is aided and abetted by the untiring imposition of theerroneous dogma.
2. Companies that are not even transferring their knowledge because it invariably gets lost inthe ether. i.e. Offshoring leads to absolute loss of intellectual capital
3. Outsourcing and offshoring of strategic projects are great for wealth redistribution, foroffsetting tax liabilities, for the provision of charitable aid to developing regions, for
deskilling your in-house development staff, and for abandoning your neighbourhood to
embrace greater income, effective exploitation and for a servile and expendable labour
force - but it also comes with its drawbacks.
Manifest requisites
In 2012, in the case of the EU (and others who would like to do the same), we should see
considerable tax incentives for all organisations that use local skills; Where no reciprocity exists, we
should consider a local skill development tax on the offshoring of all skilled and knowledge
intensive work, and the imposition of additional tax based on the availability of locally skilled
workers; and, in addition we should use taxes raised to partially fund quality technology, process
and methodology training.
2http://blogs.hbr.org/schrage/
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10. Eminent HistoriesA writers promise is like a tigers smile
Giles Lytton StracheyAspirational trends
Data used for strategic decision making should be at least as good as the data collected by the
organisation.
Data used for tactical planning should be within the bounds of accuracy required for tactical
decision making, and that no significant blind spots are emphasised or overlooked.
Data for operation decision making must be accurate to the degrees required to ensure that no
customer is lost or that any other significant risks are introduced because of low quality data.
Data quality should be as good as the data quality required to achieve satisfactory outcomes; issues
of data quality cannot be allowed to put the organisation and its stakeholders at any more risk than
that which can be tacitly assumed by the relevant organisational competencies.
Present indications
In many organisations the desired and required quality of corporate data is overlooked.
If restaurants were as lax about their hygiene as organisations are about the quality of their data,
then their kitchens would be filthy and their customers would be dying of food poisoning.
If organisations were as lax about hard cash as they are about data, then people would just be
walking in off the street to help themselves from the corporate piggy bank.
Your customers are in Germany and the customer data is half way around the world, being used to
test some badly designed and cowboy engineered dross that will never work satisfactorily in a
month of Sundays. If corporate data was valued as much as money and other obvious assets, then
this would be classed as criminal negligence, industrial espionage or attempted fraud, and
prosecuted the same way.
Manifest requisites
In 2012, organisations will get wise to the need for a comprehensive overhaul of their
understanding of data quality, data governance and operational risk. Organisations will no longer be
allowed to be free and easywith their data, especially customer and employee data, and IT
organisations will have to fall into line to stop their maverick practices of the past.
Data quality has very little to do with the single version of the truth nonsense, as in not simply
confined to simply the quality of data. Data quality should also be concerned with quality data
structures and the veracity and completeness of meta-data. Most importantly its all very well
cleaning your data, but if your target data model is a dogs dinner then all the previous DQ work
may have just been in vain.
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11. Thinking of InformationI've learned from my mistakes and I'm sure I can repeat them exactly.
Peter CookAspirational trends
2012 the DW and BI community will wake up to the fact that there is a sound body of DW / BI
project best principles, methodologies, business models, reference architectures, technologies and
techniques, and, will embrace the intention of doing the right thing right, first time, every time as
a total quality management facet of future data warehouse and business intelligence initiatives.
Present indications
So, whatever happened to agnostic Data Warehouse development methodologies? As surprising asit may seem they didnt go away, they were buried under a humongous assemblage of DW/BI
trappings, cookbooks, models and commercial detritus, then carried away on a river of corporate
tears3; and whilst this may not be strictly accurate, for all intents and purposes it is.
Back in the last millennium, about twenty summers ago, Bill Inmon, the father of data warehousing,
published what is now described as the DW bible: Building the Data Warehouse. Now in its 3 rd
edition, Inmon explains what a data warehouse is and isn't, why it's needed, how it works, and
how the traditional data warehouse can be integrated with new technologies, including the internet,
to provide enhanced customer service and support. He also addresses the trade-offs between
normalized data warehouses and dimensional data marts. 4
So, why have so many data warehouse projects been resounding failures? There are a number of
reasons:
1. Many failed data warehouse projects were only data warehouse projects in name.2. Data warehouse projects failed to align with the fundamental aspects of a data warehouse.3. The prevalence of the I dont need to understand Inmon in order to build a data
warehouse attitude.
Manifest requisites
In 2012 we have a chance to recover all the effective and proven approaches to DW and BI, and tobuild on those stable structures and techniques. In this respect, many of the other significant
practitioners in BI are contributing depth to Inmon s data warehouse development approach,
whether it is, for example, advanced techniques for data mart design and ETL processing, data
vault modelling5, or implementing compliant reference architectures and industry models.
3 Apologies to Stewart Lee http://www.stewartlee.co.uk/4 http://www.amazon.com/Building-Data-Warehouse-3rd-Inmon/dp/04710813025http://danlinstedt.com/Dan Linstedt, Data Vault Modelling and Methodology
http://danlinstedt.com/http://danlinstedt.com/http://danlinstedt.com/http://danlinstedt.com/ -
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12. False Greening of IM"I'm normally not a praying man, but if you're up there, please save me Superman."
H omer SimpsonAspirational trends
In 2012 we will wake up the fact that we need to balance impulse, desires and craven follies with
coherency, rationality, business equilibrium, empathy and a healthy concern for energy usage and
the environment.
In 2012 companies should start to ask themselves how environmentally friendly, cost effective and
energy efficient their infrastructure setups for data warehousing and business intelligence actually
are.
Present indications
Is big data really worth the energy needed to use it? Is having your business in Paris, your needs in
Patagonia and your data in Pandora, really worth the cost? Is keeping oceans of data, digitised and
stored, ready and available all year round, year in, year out, really necessary? Are barns of historical
data in OLTP systems really indispensable to all organisations? Do we really need to move so much
big data around, or use the techniques of brute force and witlessness for everything? Is having
idle servers running weekends and out of working hours really saving the planet?
The energy companies will love you for it, but will your stakeholders thank you? Organisations may
like to believe that they are socially responsible, but are you?
Here we are, 24 by 7 by 52, everything indexed, everyone connected and everything on. Bigger data,
more disks, faster disks, more CPUs, faster CPUs, more controllers, faster controllers, more
charging, more heat, more dissipation, more cooling, more searches, more inefficient searches,
more electricity consumed, more electricity generated, more electricity wasted, more oil burned,
more coal burned, more devices made, more basic resources used . Even if the label is green, a
few green boxes and components soon add up to one large consumer of energy. Just what is the
environmental impact of providing technology so that people can spend all day downloading
pornography, pirating movies, betting on sports results and messaging things like WTF!!! RU4RL?!?
LOL, whilst pretending to work?
Every time we read the words cloud computing, big data and social networking, and all the super-
inefficient brute force computing that surrounds these must haves, we should also consider the
environmental impact, and the additional energy costs that brute force and witless engineering
generates.
Manifest requisites
Its time to save the planet and to slash data centre energy consumption and costs. Smart DW and
Decision Support can be lean, mean and clean, and without the need to waste valuable resources,
whether that resource is people and know-how, time, money or energy.
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Afterword
Information Management Manifesto Initiative
The Information Management world is in a poor state. Levels of professionalism are at an all-time
low; disciplines such as Data Warehousing and Decision Support are awash with chancers,
charlatans and dogma, and as time moves on, the worse the reputation of the profession becomes.
Information Management desperately needs an ethical and professional revolution, one that all
professionals can contribute to and support. To this end, we as professionals need to create a
democratic, global and self-imposed constitutional code of ethic that professional people of
integrity will abide with and will feel that adds real value to the profession.
During 2012, cambriano energia will be working together with partners, clients, collaborators andpeers in shaping and defining a DW / DSS Manifesto, which we consider to be a necessary and
imperative initiative for promoting visible ethical and professional integrity in the DW / DSS
discipline.
To this end we have established a series of touch points through which people can engage in,
initiate and contribute to debates, discussions and discourse on ideas, suggestions and proposals for
an IM Manifesto, initially focusing on the areas of DW and Decision Support (BI, MIS, KM).
IM Manifesto Initiative Touchpoints
Twitter: @IMMANIFESTOLinkedin group:http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=4299867
Facebook group:http://www.facebook.com/groups/339430782746340/
Associated Linkedin page for theIM*NET - the IM, DW and BI professional network
group: http://www.facebook.com/groups/292721250763469/
Blogspot blog:http://immanifesto.blogspot.com/
IM Manifesto Initiative 2012 The founding
document:http://cambriano.es/content/manifesto/imManifestoDiscussion.001.20120212
.pdf
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=4299867http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=4299867http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=4299867http://www.facebook.com/groups/339430782746340/http://www.facebook.com/groups/339430782746340/http://www.facebook.com/groups/339430782746340/http://www.facebook.com/groups/292721250763469/http://www.facebook.com/groups/292721250763469/http://www.facebook.com/groups/292721250763469/http://www.facebook.com/groups/292721250763469/http://www.facebook.com/groups/292721250763469/http://www.facebook.com/groups/292721250763469/http://immanifesto.blogspot.com/http://immanifesto.blogspot.com/http://cambriano.es/content/manifesto/imManifestoDiscussion.001.20120212.pdfhttp://cambriano.es/content/manifesto/imManifestoDiscussion.001.20120212.pdfhttp://cambriano.es/content/manifesto/imManifestoDiscussion.001.20120212.pdfhttp://cambriano.es/content/manifesto/imManifestoDiscussion.001.20120212.pdfhttp://cambriano.es/content/manifesto/imManifestoDiscussion.001.20120212.pdfhttp://cambriano.es/content/manifesto/imManifestoDiscussion.001.20120212.pdfhttp://immanifesto.blogspot.com/http://www.facebook.com/groups/292721250763469/http://www.facebook.com/groups/292721250763469/http://www.facebook.com/groups/292721250763469/http://www.facebook.com/groups/339430782746340/http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=4299867 -
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Acronyms
BI Business Intelligence
CEP Complex Event Processing
CPU Central Processing Unit
DQ Data Quality
DSS Decision Support System
DW Data Warehousing
EDW Enterprise Data Warehousing
IEEE - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
KM Knowledge Management
MIS Management Information System
OLAP Online Analytical Processing