Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

It’s been a pretty hectic couple of weeks recently, with trips over to
Ireland, down to Swindon and a couple of times up to London to work with clients
and do a couple of presentations. I’ve had a lot of "dead time" where I couldn’t
really do any Oracle work or update the blog, but it’s been a good chance to
read a couple of

good

books and watch a
rather good
football
match.

I mentioned the other day that I’d volunteered to do a talk at the
forthcoming UKOUG
Scottish Event up in Edinburgh. It was all a bit of a last minute
arrangement actually as I’d stepped in after someone else pulled out, and the
track I’ve been asked to speak in is the "applications" track. The talk I’m
doing is entitled "An Introduction To Oracle Business Intelligence 10g" and
given that I’m in the apps track (and therefore not the technical track) I’m
having to give a bit of thought as to how to best put the subject across. Anyone
who’s been to one of my regular talks knows that I usually get fairly technical
and tend to cover quite a bit during the 45 minutes, but an end user
presentation such as this probably requires a bit of a different approach. To be
honest, "end user" presentations usually fill me with dread as I think you’ve
got to work a lot harder to get your message across - technical audiences are
(in my opinion) a lot more forgiving and can usually fill in the gaps in your
presentation if you cover a lot of technical concepts and jump from detail to
detail, whereas an end user audience expect a clearer, more focussed
presentation that delivers something directly relevant to their situation. I
remember hearing a phrase once - "If you throw someone three balls, chances are
they’ll drop all three, whereas if you throw just one, they’ll more than likely
catch it" and I think this is especially true when presenting to a non-technical
audience - you can’t expect everyone to have already read around the subject,
you need to explain what you’re on about, keep to a single message and not
assume that everyone will immediately get the implications of what you’re trying
to say. To be honest, doing end-user presentations is actually a good discipline
as it forces you to think about what your primary message is, focus on just one
or two things that you want the audience to take away, and strip out all the
stuff that you think might be interesting but in the end just confuses the
audience with unnecessary detail. Anyway, if you come along on the 7th, let me
know whether the talk was OK, and if you can think of a way to make it more
relevant for this type of audience let me know.

I read Tom Kyte’s recent posting on
writing a book
with interest as this is something I’ve been toying with as well. To recap a
part of Tom’s posting, writing a book for him was a bit of a career changing (or
"career affirming") exercise as it cemented in his mind the fact that he got a
lot out of helping other people, and the book itself gave him a level of
credibility that meant people had faith in acting on his recommendations. I’ve
been giving a lot of thought recently to writing a book, not that I’m saying
I’ve anywhere near the experience of people like Tom but as a way of putting
some proper structure around some of the things I write about and as a way of
helping anyone who’s trying to get something out of Oracle’s BI&W tools. If I
did put a book together, I’d try and do something that rather than just explains
what OWB does, or how Oracle OLAP cubes are built, or how Discoverer reports are
built, actually puts across a methodology for using these tools, explains why
you would use one rather than the other, and actually has some evidence and
background material to explain why, for example, an analytic workspace is
quicker to aggregate and query than a number of separarate relational
materialized views, what the difference (performance wise) between a set-based
and a row-based OWB transformation, what the differences are between the
relational and OLAP implementation of Discoverer. A kind of cross between Tom’s
"Expert One-On-One", Bert Scalzo’s book and a set of "from the trenches"
experiences in implementing the 10g BI tools. Looking at existing texts, the
major differentiator here is that it wouldn’t be a rewrite of the online
documentation - no point here as the docs are pretty good, and free to boot -
it’d actually offer a methodology, reasons for going down one route and not the
other, with rationalisations and explanations as to why one way of implementing
Oracle BI is suitable for one situation and not another. Anyway, just an idea,
maybe I’ll actually get my act together and put a proposal together someday.

Anyway, have to go now as I have to do a bit of prep for tomorrow’s customer
visit. In the meantime, I thought one or two of you might find this cutting from
Private Eye amusing. Bye for now.

"My client admits that he was drunk when he created a disturbance at
Weymouth Bay Caravan Park," defending solicitor Roger Maxwell told Weymouth
Magistrates Court. "He admits that he used threatening words and behaviour,
he admits to shouting and banging  on caravan doors, and he admits to
swearing at the police when they handcuffed him. It is also true that he is
already the subject of a two-year Anti-Social Behaviour Order. But in
mitigation, I should point out that, due to administrative error, the
wording on the ASBO specifically states that he is ‘prohibited from not
being drunk in a public place’"

After consultation with his fellow magistrates, Chairman of the bench
Colin Weston passed judgement on thirty-eight-year-old Stephen Winstone. "It
is fortunate for you that the ASBO has been badly written, because otherwise
we would have been looking to sentence you to prison for up to a couple of
years. However, you were technically fulfilling the terms of your ASBO by
being drunk in public, so the court will show leniency to you. You are fined
100." (Dorset Echo, 17/03/05. Spotter: Sue Webb)

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