In an effort to consolidate data across six separate business divisions, MassHousing, a leading provider of affordable housing for individuals and major developments across the state of Massachusetts, deployed business intelligence (BI) to consolidate large quantities of disparate data in a fast and efficient way. In tandem with its executive information system (EIS), MassHousing established a business intelligence competency center (BICC), to ensure consistent deployment across the organization and efficiency of all BI systems. MassHousing is one best practice organization that is taking its business intelligence initiative a step further with a BICC to help enable true business optimization.
Posted May 15, 2008
In the 1958 IBM Journal article that is generally acknowledged as the first usage of the term "business intelligence," author Hans Peter Luhn described the challenges and goals of the BI community in terms that are profoundly resonant nearly a half-century later.
Posted April 15, 2008
The complexities of today's IT environments make protecting data an ongoing challenge. Effectively securing data necessitates knowing where that data resides at any given point in time. However, as companies outsource tasks such as order processing, customer service, and fulfillment, this information becomes increasingly difficult to ascertain. Many of the external systems that house such data are not visible and are often not understood by those responsible for certifying compliance with regulations such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).
Posted April 15, 2008
Lately, I have been rereading one of my favorite books on change: Our Iceberg Is Melting by John Kotter and Holger Rathgeber. The book shares a fable in which a colony of penguins discovers that their Antarctic iceberg is melting. If the penguins do nothing, the iceberg will shortly melt away and dump the penguins into cold, dark waters of the Antarctic Ocean, which will eventually lead to their deaths from cold and exhaustion. The manner in which the penguins deal with this change holds some great lessons for all of us.
Posted April 15, 2008
The concept of a configuration management system (CMS) is an idea whose time has come - particularly since the release of IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) Version 3, known as V3. ITIL V3 devotes considerable attention to the importance of a CMS. If you're not already familiar with a CMS and its functions, you may be wondering what's included in it, and how it differs from a configuration management database, known as a CMDB. So let's take a look at this vital component of a long-term IT management strategy
Posted April 15, 2008
In recent years, disaster recovery has garnered attention from the company boardroom to the Office of the CIO. Despite this fact, many companies have yet to implement an effective DR solution to safeguard their applications and data. This inertia is attributed to two factors - perception of the term "Disaster" ("when the disaster happens, we'll deal with it then") and shortcomings of existing solutions ("we don't have budget for machines to sit by idly").Due to the rarity of catastrophic disasters such as earthquakes, floods and fires, organizations rarely implement comprehensive disaster protection measures. However, there is another set of "technical disasters" that are caused by much more mundane events which regularly lead to significant system outages. These span faulty system components (server, network, storage, and software), data corruptions, backup/recovery of bad data, wrong batch jobs, bad installations/upgrades/patches, operator errors, and power outages, among others.
Posted March 15, 2008
Despite efforts to "democratize" business intelligence, it has remained stubbornly confined to a chosen few within organizations. Although vendors have worked hard to convince enterprises that their BI solutions could be extended to line-of-business managers and employees, high-end analytic tools have remained confined to power users or analysts with statistical skills, while the remainder of the organization relies on spreadsheets to cobble together limited pieces of information.This disconnect was confirmed in a 2007 survey conducted by Unisphere Research for the Oracle Applications Users Group, which found that most companies are still a long way off from the ideal of BI for all. The OAUG survey found that for the most part, BI reporting remains tied up in IT departments, and is still limited to analysts or certain decision makers. The majority of survey respondents said that it takes more than three to five days to get a report out of IT. Overall, the survey found, fewer than 10 percent of employees have access to BI and corporate performance management tools.
Posted March 15, 2008
When database administrators swap war stories, they are likely to relate similar tales about the woes of managing time-series data that may include clogs, jams, and general inefficiency. Why the ubiquitous complaints? Because a standard, relational database is not equipped to handle the rigorous demands this kind of data dishes out to its handlers.
Posted February 15, 2008
Emerging as the face of business intelligence (BI), dashboard technology has proven to be an integral component of any enterprise-wide BI strategy. Dashboards allow companies to benefit from a wealth of data and leverage their information assets through visually rich, responsive, and personalized BI indicators. Moreover, through effective BI dashboards, business leaders gain heightened insight into and visibility across the organization, allowing them to detect and solve problems quickly and make informed decisions on the spot.
Posted February 15, 2008
The data explosion driving data warehouse equipment purchases in the last few years has just begun. Equipment proliferation already pressurizes data center energy requirements. Fortunately, a column-based analytics server can help companies with both kinds of green - the environment and money - by offering enormous energy and cost reductions while significantly boosting performance.
Posted February 15, 2008
Efficiently sharing and managing the backup of data are common problems facing every organization, especially those with multiple, geographically-dispersed sites. Providing an adequate solution to both problems can be a vexing challenge. Businesses are under increased pressure from users and from auditors to facilitate secure, reliable, and auditable data transfer with near instantaneous access, data reliability, version coherency, and file security.
Posted January 15, 2008
There is perhaps no area within database administration more time-consuming or fraught with difficulty as the need to accurately shepherd the varied and ongoing vectors of change across an organization's database infrastructure. A typical company has hundreds of databases, each with thousands of database objects, instantiated across multiple environments. The process of database change management touches many different people in the organization, including analysts, architects, modelers, developers, and DBAs; it also invokes common umbrella functions, such as change management, corporate security, data governance and SOA.
Posted January 15, 2008
High-profile Internet security violations are on the evening news every week. Although the publicized computer break-ins seem to command the most attention, a wide range of other Internet violations and computer crimes now populate the IT landscape. An array of stakeholders - ranging from those in the executive suite to customers to regulators - are increasingly coming to view data as one of the most critical assets of the enterprise and the pressure is growing to treat it as such.
Posted January 15, 2008