Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

… that the hot topic in BI is “intelligence to the masses”. Cognos have just acquired a dashboard and operational reporting vendor, Celequest. Interestingly, Celequest also market a BI appliance product, a bit of a departure from the traditional Cognos world
I somehow doubt this will be the only vendor purchase this year. What were the […]

One of our customers is on Oracle 9.2, we would dearly love to move them to 10g but for certification reasons with their chosen query tool we can’t upgrade them until the tool is also upgraded which in turn is linked to the version of JVM associated with their terminal server environment. We upgraded the […]

Sometimes people write to me or post questions on the blog along the lines of “I’m new to data warehouses, which xxxx is best?” where xxxx could be tool, database, hardware platform, design methodology, in fact, xxxx could be almost anything.
Well, nothing is clear-cut, the fact that choices are available and people continue to make […]

The final installment on the ingredients for successful BI is about data quality. For some strange reason, if users do not trust the quality of data in a BI system the system will fall into disrepute and be seen as a failure. Now I said “strange reason” and in truth there is a degree of […]

Let’s be honest here, the BI world is changing; it is no longer the exclusive domain of an elite group of data analysts (the sort of people where being an extrovert is to look at someone else’s shoes whilst talking). BI is now (or should be) part of every worker’s daily life; from the CxO […]

So what is timeliness? Again this a purposely vague term. I suppose that “knowing something when you need to know it” is timely; and the sooner you know something the more options you have to react to the information. But in reality this depends on the nature of the information - looking at last month’s […]

Now that is a good interview question - the simplicity of the question hides a vast richness of answers; it can differentiate between the “been there, done it” and the “read a book”; it can tease out the roundedness of a candidate - are they reporting tool biased or database centric. It can also separate […]

One of the themes I keep retuning to is the time dimension in Data Warehouses. I use the word “time” in the physics sense of something continuous and not the cyclical “clock” sense. Time (and in my sense, time could be measured in units far more coarse than hours and minutes) is almost ubiquitous in […]

One of my customers uses a web-based user query tool to interrogate their data warehouse. For some while the Tomcat component of the system has been, let’s say, fragile; it often disappears in a puff of metaphorical smoke with a error log message about running out of memory. That should not happen - we think […]

One of the risks of presenting a reporting tool to IT professionals is that they go for the geek-factor; the sort of “wow, that’s clever” type of reporting that in reality business users would never use because:

It does not contain information the business can react to
It is not ‘in your face’ immediate

Often presenting simple, but […]