Blog: David Loshin

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March 11, 2008

Separated at Birth?

I couldn't resist: Is disgraced super advocate governor Eliot Spitzer somehow related to super sailor Popeye?

Two interesting aspects of the Spitzer situation. First, his tactics at using information to track down targets for prosection as NY State Attorney General are prime exmaples of exploiting business intelligence to identify patterns of misbehavior. Second, one would think that, knowing the tactics to be used to seek out suspicious activity, would have hesitated to expose himself to discovery via the same tactics.

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March 7, 2008

My Business Intelligence (or is it Intelligent Business) Library

For some reason, I have acquired a habit of buying books at the airport. It could be that due to some lingering guilt about limitations on my personal productivity as I spend time getting from one place to another, I feel compelled to buy books that have some business relevance to read at the gate while waiting for all the business class and premier travelers to board the airplane.

I am finding, though, that I am building up an interesting set of books that provide value to the way I look at the use of information, so I thought I'd share a list of books that I have recently read, am currently reading, or plan to read some time in the near future. Each one deals with aspects of how we can learn from what we know, learn from what we don't know, then exploit what we can learn:

"The Wisdom of Crowds," by James Surowiecki
"Freakanomics, " by Steven Leavitt and Stephen Dubner
"The Tipping Point," by Malcolm Gladwell
"Blink," by Malcolm Gladwell
"The Black Swan," by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
"Fooled by Randomness," by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
"The Long Tail," by Chris Anderson
"Fortune's Formula," by William Poundstone
"Linked," by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
"The World is Flat," by Thomas Friedman
"Collapse," by Jared Diamond

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March 5, 2008

Insight on MDM

Earlier this week I attended the MDM Insight event that TDWI ran in Savannah, GA. The hosted event employed a different model than other TDWI events, in which qualified participants were invited to attend, and vendor sponsors were provided with direct access to demonstrate their products' capabilities.

One of my roles at the event was to moderate a short workshop session to help attendees articulate what they believed were their most critical needs for master data management. One interesting common reaction was confusion about what composed an MDM solution, and what were the vendors actually selling. Another frequent reaction was expressing difficulty in lining up the requisite set of ducks within a reasonable amount of time to garner enough "horizontal support. Third, a general consensus was that instituting MDM was best done as an adjunct to existing application development (e.g. to support BI), focusing on small projects.

Actually, that last one confused me a bit, since if it only centering on a small application area (and not the whole enterprise), could it really be "master data" management?

Oh, one more thing - it may be worthwhile to consider the qualitative (and feasibility) differences between creating a "single golden source of truth" and an environment supporting the transparent access to a unified view of uniquely identifiable master objects (my current definition of what MDM is, by the way).

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