Dataspace Blog

Is your terminology causing your BI / DW team to head in the wrong direction? As a business intelligence and data warehousing consultant I constantly work with IT teams that, even internally, can’t agree on whether they have a data warehouse, a data mart, a reporting database, or something else. As a result they’re not sure what BI /

For those who’ve been wondering why schools don’t teach at least introductory programming, a large group of industry and government leaders have drafted and signed a petition asking congress to provide funding for this. While I graduated from an engineering university (Lehigh – our mascot actually was the Engineer!) – I went there for accounting. I gravitated to computer

Face the Facts – IT Does Interfere with Business Agility It’s a rare organization where the business staff doesn’t complain that IT is holding them back. This is, in fact, one of the key reasons why there is friction between IT and the users they support. Rather than just write this off to whiney users who don’t

If there is one question we hear from almost every Dataspace client, it is, “Do I have big data?” Many clients are torn about the prospect of big data. On the one hand, having big data represents a sort of badge of honor, i.e. “We do so much business and capture so much data that

I build data warehouses. I understand why they’re important, I make a living from them. I also see that traditional, relational data warehouses are on the way out. Their demise is coming from a few technological advances. One of these is the ubiquitous, and growing, Hadoop. But, for small to mid-sized companies, the biggest advance is the

I get a kick out of how vendors tout Business Intelligence. It’s usually something like, “Get more out of your data” OR “Don’t you want to be data driven?” OR “All the really cool companies are doing it, shouldn’t you?”  The problem is that this doesn’t say a bit about what you can really do

Are you wondering if your organization is at the point where it needs to improve its reporting capabilities and invest in a business intelligence system? This note is the first in an occasional series of emails and blog posts that describe situations that have been the impetus for Dataspace clients to build new, modern business

I remember watching a really good webinar one time entitled Ten Changes to Maximize the Impact of Your BI Strategy by Gartner analyst Kurt Schlegel.  I found it to be well worth the hour spent on it (perhaps because it confirmed many of my own opinions!) and have recommended it to a number of folks.

What is Business Intelligence? It’s the set of tools, abilities, and data required to create a picture of the world and how your organization operates in that world. In building your business intelligence capabilities, you can learn a lot by looking at a historical precedent – the rise of radar detection capabilities – and applying