Recently in Business Intelligence Category

Yesterday I read a great article about neuroscientist Craig Bennet who purchased an Atlantic salmon and put it under an fMRI machine to scan its (presumably non-working) brain. Oh, yes, by the way, it was a *dead* salmon. With the fish in the scanner, it was shown a series of pictures, and the salmon was "asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing."

While this already sounds like a fishy story, wait - it gets better: during the scanning, it appeared that "voxels" (video images indicating activity) showed up in the fish's brain. The simple conclusion? Dead fish can think!

Of course, that is ridiculous, and the purpose of the scanning was not to show that dead fish have brain activity when asked questions, but to look at how on occaision, random noise that creeps into these scans appears to show false positive information, with the objective to suggest more rigorous validation of statistical methods when attempting to filter out random noise so as to prevent drawing conclusions from what is potentially flawed data.

While I would call this a less orthodox process for establishing the value of data quality, it certainly provides a general lesson regarding quality of information on output from a reporting activitiy.

An interesting article about people leaving facebook caught my eye because it resonated with some of the same issues I have had with it - inspired nosiness, misrepresentations of the concept of a friend (vs. connection), the way some people become obsessed and absorbed into it, and other observations.

After I had signed up (prodded by an old friend with whom I had fallen out of touch), I started to see others from my (growingly hazy view of the) past contact me asking to be connected. I guess I just said yes, and ended up with some connections, which led to other requests, etc.

So facebook is a little different than my other social network, linkedin.com, which is valuable to me as a business tool. Facebook does not provide that value, although it is interesting to see what people I used to know a long time ago are doing (hmm, a little nosy there, eh?).

The problem is that there are reasons that I stopped being in touch with a lot of former acquaintences, and getting back in touch with people that I no longer have much in common with is interesting at first but benign moving forward. And despite the few situations in which I am connectede with someone I regret losing touch with, it makes me have to actively ignore people that I have been able to passively ignore for a good twenty years or so.

On the other hand, there are some folks (like my friend Jeremy Epstein) who are building careers out of exploiting social marketing, and from an information perspective, there seems to be a lot of opportunity (check out Stephen Baker's book Numerati for some good examples as well).

I am interested - what is your experience with Facebook - as a connectivity tool, as a business tool, as an entertainment forum? post your comments!

As part of working with a client on some technical aspects of their master data management program, I recently participated in a review of some of the record matching and linkage strategies being applied to consolidate data from a collection of source data systems. While listening to the conversations during the meetings, it occurred to me that without a reasonable understanding of how record linkage works, it is difficult to assess the suitability of an algorithm, business rules, or blocking strategies associated with any of the major duplicate analysis, matching engine, or MDM tools.

I suggested to the client that it would be worthwhile to know as much about linkage as the vendors do, and recommended Herzog, Scheuren, and Winkler's recent book on record linkage, "Data Quality and Record Linkage Techniques." This book is a really good resource to get an understanding of what record linkage is, how it works, and why it is important to a master data management activity, and the authors are well-known reserachers in the area of record linkage. Definitely worth reading, let me know what you think.

Sybase has just posted a white paper that I wrote on high performance analytics using column-oriented databases. Despite my recent (10+ year) foray in the data world, my original background is in high performance data parallel computing. Parallel columnar database systems reflect the best of both worlds I have lived in, and I hope you guys find the paper interesting!

Interesting in pervasive business intellignce? I am presenting at a series of upcoming live events, sponsored by Informatica, Teradata, and Microstrategy. In these talks, I will be explorng the concept of "right-time" operational business intelligence, the business and value drivers, and the basic expectations for technology components that would enable expanded delivery of actionable intelligence to decision-makers across the organization.

The title of the event is "Turn Uncertainty to Advantage: Operational Business Intelligence is the Key," and you can register by clicking on the links below:

St. Louis, May 5th

Milwaukee, May 6th

Kansas City, May 7th

Cincinnati, May 20th

Indianapolis, May 21

Las Vegas, June 3