Steve Mills, IBM Senior VP, has issued an internal memo announcing a significant split of the software group into a solutions and a middleware division. The shake up includes some very senior executives as well.

I just watched a cute video by Nic Smith on the history of Business Intelligence. Granted it was a shill for Microsoft but still it was cute and mostly accurate. However, there was one erroneous attribute that I think most people may not know. The term, "Business Intelligence" was not coined by Howard Dresner as stated in the video -- he did a fine job of making it popular but he did not invent the term. Read on to find out where it was first used...

For my entire career in BI and data warehousing (going on more than 20 years now), I have heard the expression -- BI should be "easy to use". I suggest that it is time for BI's tag line to change to "easy to consume". Here's why.

OK -- I have had a whole weekend to simmer down about John Thain, former CEO of Merrill Lynch, and his behavior. But it just kept getting worse and this morning, I have just had enough.

We decorated our Christmas tree last weekend -- and I realized that the decorations were snapshots of our family history -- basically our personal data warehouse. Certainly our tree will never make it into Good Housekeeping or win a prize for best decorations -- you could say it was "eclectic" to be kind -- but it is filled with many, many lovely memories...