1.   The last time I checked, the NBA All-Star teams were stocked with players from 20 or so teams.  Kobe Bryant, Dwight Howard, LeBron James, Steve Nash and Dwayne Wade all play for different teams.  If a consultancy puts forward its team as the all-league all-star team, with no deficiencies whatsoever, that is a red flag.  All teams have them.  Both sides should understand this and strive for a best fit, given the realities that talent gets spread around naturally.

2.       However, consulting teams need a winning formula.  Do they know what it is?  Will that work in your environment?  For the Lakers, it was Kobe and a solid supporting cast.  For the Magic, it was Howard, Lewis, Turkoglu and a solid rotation.  Other teams put all shooters on the floor or play defense first.   

3.       I did not notice an NBA team, in an effort to save money, put the cheapest, most inexperienced player they could find on the court this season.  Heck, there are people who would pay for the glory of paying.  No, I think every team tried their best to win as many games as possible.  If your consulting team consists of 3 solid players that you are presented with, with the rest to be named later, make sure they are not filling it out with the cheapest players they can find.  Of course, that is misguided on their part as well, but sometimes you need to save the consultancies from doing the wrong thing for both of you.

4.       Scores and game clocks are not kept in the referee's head.  He does not suddenly blow the whistle and say "game over, Suns win 104-99, goodbye."  The time and the score are kept on large scoreboards for all to see throughout the game.  Do you have a scoreboard?  Does your consultancy?  It is important to know how much progress is being made throughout the game.

5.       Beyond the starting 5, NBA benches are filled with world-class athletes, many of whom get as much or more playing time as starters.  What is your consultancy's bench?  I'm not referring, necessarily, to their employees not on billing, but just what is their contingency plan in case of injury, sudden and unexpected poor performance or if a player were to leave in the middle of the game?  Is the consultancy plugged into the culture of the discipline they are engaged in?  Do they have a warm network?  Do they scout?

6.       NBA teams come to expect certain things from the places they play - things like fans, referees, locker rooms, food, transportation, hoops, lights, a marked court and basketballs to play with.  What is your consulting team expecting from you?  Software?  Hardware?  Requirements?  Access to certain individuals?  Physical space?  The ability to network their laptops?  It would be a drag to see the game try to start without a basketball or to have the lights go out in the 3^rd quarter.  Clear up expectations ahead of time with your consultancy.

7.       When the Pistons show up to the American Airlines Arena in Miami, they expect the Heat to come out of the dressing room to play against.  Imagine their surprise should the Warriors come out!  Or they have to play against 6 players on the court.  Now, they have game-planned for one team (5 players at a time) and get to play an entirely different team.  This bit of surprise will not help the Pistons be successful that night.  Is there information the consultancy is not asking for that they should be in order to know what they are up against?

8.       Sure, playing basketball is fun.  However, it's also work.  Players dive after loose balls, flying into the stands if necessary, and are expected to go all out with little consequence to their body.  They need to be skilled at avoiding injury, but cannot play overly concerned with it.  There are many moments in a consulting project where it's less fun and more work.  Are you hiring a consultancy that is prepared for the potential hard work ahead?

9.       NBA teams shoot about 80 field goals per game, hitting less than half.  Actually, only a handful of players in the league hit over 50 percent of their field goals.  However, you can't score or win if you don't shoot.  The Harlem Globetrotters are entertaining when they go into their circle and keep passing the ball, but you don't see that in a real game.  Is your consultancy willing to shoot, and are you willing to let them, even though half of the shots aren't going in, or is the consultancy interested in making entertaining passes, perhaps back to you? 

10.   Finally, experience counts.  At the NBA draft last week, I was alarmed when the announcers said that some of the second round picks would not even make the NBA.  Only 60 players are drafted each year, all with eye-popping highlights from college and European leagues, and some won't make it?!  That's how tough it is.  Is your consultancy circumventing this rule and passing along the inexperienced to you?

ParAccel is a columnar, MPP, TPC-H-submitted data warehouse appliance.  I received an update from ParAccel yesterday and in the wake of the public challenges at some other small firms filling some similar market needs, I was curious about their customer wins and continued development.  I'm happy to report there has been some of both.  Some of the information is embargoed, but keep an eye on them for announcements soon.

What I can say is I received a sneak peak at PADB (ParAccel Analytic database) V2.0 as well as a customer review.  Their new deal was sold by EMC, and this is, in my opinion, perhaps a forbearer of a new outlet for ParAccel as well as where EMC might participate in the large data appliance market.  EMC is a technology partner to ParAccel.

I have otherwise talked about these columnar appliances and when to use them.

PADB Version 2 innovations include SAN-Based optimizations which will find ParAccel claiming to be the fastest data processing machine in the world.

ParAccel uses a leader node, similar to Netezza, but different from Veritca and others, which initiates, coordinates, and collects results for the distributed queries and parallel load operations supported by the system.   The SAN utilization in Version 2 may further differentiate ParAccel and Vertica.  ParAccel is a one of the recent market entrants with the potential to offer "game changing".  

I read "Data Modeling for the Business" by Hoberman, Burbank and Bradley this week.  It's an excellent read that I recommend and I will have a book review up here on the Network soon.

Page 120 sparked something that I thought I'd blog about.  It says "if you tell the sponsor that this initiative will help improve the company's marketing program effectiveness by making sure that we have correct customer information, and that all departments are sharing this information for their corporate-wide initiatives, you are likely to get some interest (and funding!)."

While I agree with the sentiment of aligning initiatives with the business goals, there is another part of the story I wanted to interject.  The problem in gaining interest may not be in the alignment.  Sponsors may agree that doing the project (in this case, data modeling) well will achieve some important business goals.  However, the problem may be that they do not believe that the people bringing the idea are well equipped to EXECUTE the project appropriately to achieve the desired results.

The point is to not only align projects, but also to convey the capability to deliver on the promise. 

Join me next Thursday as I talk about the Hottest Issues in Oracle Business Intelligence.

Abstract:

Oracle Corporation (Oracle) is undoubtedly one of the market leaders in business intelligence technology.  With tools and products for just about every business function and problem, Oracle Business Intelligence (OBI) offers something for your entire enterprise.

But with so many options available, what's a customer to do?  How does one make sense of Oracle Business Intelligence?

William McKnight, Lucidity Consulting Group's Information Management Practice Lead, understands the confusion around OBI.  A highly experienced business intelligence architect and analyst, William has worked with companies across the country to help them implement appropriate OBI strategies and technologies.

Leveraging that experience, William has put together a highly informative webinar for this spring on The Hottest Issues in OBI!

This complimentary, 60-minute webinar is scheduled for Thursday, May 14, 2009 from 1pm to 2pm Central.  During the session, William will a range of OBI-related topics.  Those include:

• Oracle's BI and EPM product evolution
• Oracle BI applications:  What do you really get?
• OBIEE+, OBI applications and Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM):
  What are the differences and which is right for your business?

With the economy tightening, one benefactor has been syndicated information.  Many companies, in their search for additional revenue streams, are now selling their data to the syndicated marketplace.  Some had not even known about the option, while others had been opposed to doing so.  Those who can do this are those with good information management.

While this adds some more data to the syndicated marketplace - for you to utilize - it also adds some more chaos to that world.  Syndicators are quickly integrating their new assets with their existing business and consumer profiles.

Consider newspapers.  The market is moving away from print content and to digital content.  Newspapers had the position of community pillar and the the storekeeper of its data.  For many years, there was little else to turn to for advertisement.  Now, there are the eBays, amazons, CraigsLists, googles, etc., and many are running with community sections now so they have global efficiencies with localization.  They are game-changers.  Newspapers may fall further behind.  One challenge has been the newspapers structure of separating the digital and print teams.  A place to begin bringing these together is at the information.

There is a lot of business intelligence news coming out of the Microsoft camp.  First, sooner than expected, they have released the SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse, which is the development of the Datallego acquisition and Microsoft's entry into the appliance marketplace.

Some time ago, they also announced Kilimanjaro, the next version of SQL Server, and Gemini, the next version of SQL Server Analysis Services.  I didn't rush out and blog this though because the release is not expected until 2010.  Still, it's exciting and worth thinking about now.  And who knows, maybe these will emerge sooner than expected.

I thought SQL Server 2005 was BI focused.  Now, Microsoft says Kilimanjaro will really be BI focused.  And they could be right.  With the addition of optional column-oriented storage capabilities and in-memory storage, they are addressing 2 very obvious ways the market has recently addressed performance.  Both options were built from scratch by Microsoft.  I look forward to seeing how the optimizer determines when to go columnar vs. not.  To-date, solutions have addressed it with disparate systems and obvious suboptimal performance of some of the queries within each system. 

I'm a fan of SSAS as long as the MOLAP option is not overused, but that's another story.  Stronger connectivity is promised between Gemini and Excel and that may really get the casual user's attention.  Gemini will be publishing data to SharePoint Server as well.  SharePoint is becoming a centerpiece of Microsoft BI activity.  With the publishing options,Gemini will have the Microsoft enterprise covered.

What will be the next game changer?

Pivotlink is a pure SaaS play for midmarket or enterprise departmental needs.  They make a clear claim to target companies with BI shelfware and have a number of case studies where customer's BI needs were met with PivotLink after failures with other solutions. 

Pivotlink delivers data in various forms, but mostly based around the concept of a pivot table, providing ad-hoc data access across a high level of dimensionality.   

Interestingly, I have learned that PivotLink uses a proprietary columnar in-memory database management system.  This DBMS is not sold separately.  As with any columnar, there is a high compression ratio.

And here you can see how the Pivotlink data model is customizable through an abstracted view.

From a technology perspective, Pivotlink is interesting from its combination of in vogue approaches like columnar DBMS and SaaS.  It claims access to a variety of source systems, supporting customers with billions of rows of data like REI.

We're excited to announce that I'll be on the Exhibit floor at Enterprise Data World in Tampa April 5-9th. I will be part of the Consultant's Corridor.

Enterprise Data World (formerly known as the DAMA International Symposium & Wilshire Meta Data Conference) is the most comprehensive data & information management conference. It features 150 expert-led sessions and case studies covering the entire range of data and information management topics. Visit the conference website to learn more.

Technorati tags: data warehouse, Business Intelligence, enterprise data world

Oracle provides so many options in business intelligence (BI) today that the dilemma sometimes becomes sorting through the tools, the packages and the respective product directions. They are decidedly moving (moved?) into a 'packaged' BI direction. The theory is that nobody builds an ERP system anymore, nor should they build a BI system and that Oracle BI Applications provide faster time to value, lower TCO and assured business value. My teams have been implementing the Oracle BI Applications.

With Informatica built-in (to be switched to Oracle Data Integrator, the former Sunopsis, in the next few years), most any source can be brought in to the applications. However, principally Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) and Peoplesoft will source the Financials, Human Resources, Supply Chain & Order Management and Procurement & Spend applications and Siebel sources the Sales, Service and Marketing applications. All work off a common enterprise model (the Business Analytics Warehouse), consisting of dozens of star schemas, premapped metadata, prebuilt ETL and a library of prebuilt metrics, dashboards, reports and alerts. Each application populates a subset of the entire warehouse and uses a subset of the other assets (i.e., the Financials Application populates 16 star schemas.) It's actually a well-done schema, with conformed dimensions, standard naming and depth to the dimensions. It makes a lot of sense if you have the Oracle sources in your operational environment.

However, very real decisions often need to made between using the Oracle BI Applications and OBIEE+. This decision is ongoing in nature, often continuing after the "OBI Apps" installation. OBIEE+ is the flagship product - actually suite of products - of Oracle BI, from a tools perspective. OBIEE+, of course, is the tool with the OBI Apps. OBIEE+ consists of OBIEE, which is the former Siebel Analytics (which originally came from nQuire). This is the Oracle's primary BI tool. When Oracle bought Siebel, it was primarily for the CRM tools, but the BI tool has turned out to be a major asset as well. OBIEE+ is OBIEE and BI Publisher, Interactive Reporting, SQR Production Reporting, Financial Reporting and Web Analysis. If you're new to Oracle BI, I realize all of these could use some elaboration.

These are all Oracle BI assets, as is OBISE1. The old Discoverer is called OBISE and OBISE1 has nothing to do with OBISE, it's a 5-50 user license of OBIEE+.

Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) is the other mantra and it refers to the former Hyperion analytic applications with cube architectures. There's 9 Hyperion applications available, outside the scope of the OBI Apps. These are mostly financial in nature and it's the framework for building the custom cubes that you get with the Hyperion applications.

Furthermore, until (and after) BI and EPM merge at Oracle, many requirements can be met with either  Essbase or OBIEE+.  Essbase is the former Hyperion product which spins up cubes for fast performance within a selective set of data. SmartView, an Excel add-in, is the main front end, but OBIEE can also be a front end to Essbase.

 Technorati tags: data warehouse, Business Intelligence, Oracle, OBIEE, OBIEE+, enterprise performance management, hyperion, obise1

I have 4 upcoming talks that I wanted to make you aware of.  Say hello if you're making it out to any of these.

"Understanding Master Data Management and the Benefits" at the North Central Oracle Applications User Group Training day on February 23 in Oakbrook, IL.

"Understanding the Benefits of Operational Business Intelligence" at the Dallas TDWI chapter on March 13.  

"Incorporating Syndicated Data into your Information Management environment" at Enterprise Data World April 7. Tampa, FL.

"Top 10 Mistakes Companies make in forming Enterprise Data Governance" at Collaborate 09, sometime May 3-7 tbd.  Orlando, FL.

Please support ongoing professional education.  As you may be aware, several conferences have cancelled and many have shortened their programs this year.  This is a good time to enhance skills, which is necessary in any economic environment. 

Technorati tags: data warehouse, Business Intelligence, enterprise data world, data governance, operational business intelligence, syndicated data, master data management