Seven steps to smooth data warehouse development – TechRepublic
1. Rethink your approach to applications
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In my InfoWorld column this week (“Blogging behind the firewall“), I write about a small but really amazing outpouring of information-sharing in InfoWorld’s IT department since we started a group weblog a few months ago. After I filed my column, I came across a Jon Udell column (“Publishing a project weblog“) on roughly the same subject (with slight differences which I’ll get to in a moment) — about a year ahead of me, as Jon tends to be. In my experience so far, weblogs work best as documentation repositories in the spirit of what Scott Ambler has written about as “agile documentation,” a concept I also discussed recently.
Scoble wonders what we write about in our internal InfoWorld weblog. Here are a few recent headlines to posts with some background info in parentheses:
- Vacation – IT staff (a scintillating view into the summer vacation schedule for InfoWorld’s IT staff)
- Long-term equipment plan (5-year plan for Test Center capital spending)
- FY 05 Capital budget planning (our purchase plans for web site scaling, desktop/laptop replacements, etc. for next fiscal year)
- Oracle migration procedure (a step-by-step explanation of what we did to upgrade from Oracle 8i on Solaris to Oracle 9i on Linux for our CMS)
- Firewall settings (see why this stuff isn’t public?)
- MX record trick to fake out spammers
- InfoWorld: Behind the Music (a link to a Quicktime video clip of various members of the InfoWorld IT team rocking out during a recent off-site retreat, shot with an iSight camera — see the photo of Wade Grubbs — our systems administrator and resident musician — with this post)
DM Review – Beyond the Data Warehouse: What is a Data/Information Architecture Strategy?
Historically, IT shops really stink at aligning business needs to technology. The architectures tend to be statements of technical direction. When the need for the business case arrives, the resulting deliverable is a spreadsheet full of assumptions of faster queries or more efficient impact analysis.
Recommendation: Formulate and adopt a liberal policy on when and how data from transactional systems are to be made available.
Resolve conflicts between needs of transactional systems and needs for university access to data.
Provide ongoing awareness training about information security; – not data security – information security…
The full document is located here
DAP Team Recommendations
DM Review – BI Briefs: Shedding Light on Data Shadow Systems
Is your company losing money because of data shadow systems? If so, you’re not alone. They are everywhere – dozens (maybe hundreds) of Microsoft Access databases, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, SAS databases and localized systems used by business groups.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The promise of the enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and the emergence of enterprise application integration (EAI), data warehousing (DW) and business intelligence (BI) technologies was supposed to revolutionize the way business was conducted, or at least the way systems supported streamlined business processes.
DM Review – Data Migration Strategies, Part 1
Business focus and strategies driving business change over a span of time. Inevitably the core business processes captured in numerous information systems applications get retired and replaced with newer, more functional systems.
There are a number of weblogs used to help keep track of UIS activity -
The morning report and the work in progress.
Each of these has an RSS feed,
http://n126.data.arizona.edu/uis_blogs/manage/index.rdf
http://n126.data.arizona.edu/uis_blogs/morning_report/index.rdf
with additional RSS feeds for status information from the production system.
http://www.uis.arizona.edu/uis/metadata.rss
— updated weekly with metadata changes (SIS/FRS dictionary)
http://www.uis.arizona.edu/uis/uis-status.rss
— current open/close status
http://www.uis.arizona.edu/uis/uis-fle.rss
— latest build process errors
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WriteTheWeb – What is a k-log?
Some people are taking the concept of weblogs and applying it to the wider concept of knowledge management. The result is k-logging (“knowledge-logging”). But will it catch on – will your employer dump Lotus Notes databases in favour of browsers and blog-style brain-dumps?
Teaching
Teaching is didactic – the teacher has prepared information to deliver
Teacher determines the direction, content and conclusion
Teacher is the focal point of the session
Two-way communication may often be restricted
Students are passive, except to take notes
Outcomes of teaching/ learning tested in assignments or exams