Blog: Jill Dyche

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The Sopranos' Final Curtain Call

In which a disappointed Jill muses on uncreative endings, and ending uncreatively.

Re: The Sopranos finale, add me to the list of all those people who went “Whaa???” Amidst some none-too-subtle buildup, the screen went black. No resolution. No tying up loose ends with Dr. Melfi. No coming clean with Carmela. Nada-bing! Against a Journey soundtrack, no less. It was all so unsatisfying.

I’d guessed at several possible endings, but I would have bet money that Tony would be off-ed in the last 5 minutes—perhaps by a reinvigorated Uncle Junior!—and that his son A.J. (or in a bold directorial flourish, his daughter Meadow) would wind up running the business. The series’ final scene would be some sort of symbolic torch-passing ritual. Instead, absent closure, viewers were left to substitute their own resolutions and create their own parallel realities.

This sort of reminds me of how we treat data. (C’mon, now! You knew I’d be delivering a wacky corollary, didn’t you?) We find, extract, profile, define, transform, load, and deploy our BI data. But when the business doesn’t leverage all that hard work, we wonder why. We’ve done all this complex manipulation according to what our constituents expect. Then there’s a letdown. Kind of a datus-interruptus.

I knew a data warehouse manager once who measured his team based on the number of tables they loaded onto the data warehouse and the total net number of new rows in each table. The manager proudly circulated spreadsheets that showed the rise in data volumes on the warehouse. The database and storage vendors were pleased as punch. But the business executives asked the same questions they’d asked with other high-visibility IT programs: “What have we spent, and what are we getting?”

Reluctant to engage business users, inexperienced with business and data requirements processes, fearful of challenging source system owners, adverse to requesting funding for data profiling tools, the data warehouse manager continued the data loading binge, insisting on his own version of success. The data warehouse has recently been moved to “steady state” budget, which means no new funding. Now, even the best post-implementation spin can’t save it.

Fade to black.

Technorati Tags: The Sopranos, data warehouse, business intelligence, BI funding

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