Seen and Not Seen has an interesting post about “the tyranny of the average” in the design world.  A good read, worth the time.  If you are in a hurry, this graphic tells the gist of the story very clearly: This has got me thinking about a lot of things we do in the data world, [...]

Dion Hinchcliffe has been writing some interesting stuff about web 2.0 in the enterprise. His latest post is a bit of a rant againstWikipedia, but push on and it is worth the read. Lately I have been pondering the impact of things like SOA and mashups in the enterprise context, blending in the web dialtone discussion that is happening on the O’Reilly Radar. Putting on my prediction hat, [...]

James Taylor (no, not that James Taylor, the other one) had an interesting article about SOA’s, agility, and architecture. While the article is a riff on another article (which makes this a meta-riff, I suppose) , it got me to thinking about the development lifecycle. I think it is very ironic that in ETL and data-oriented programming we run into the same contradictions all the time: [...]

Classifying ETL It will help to take a bit of time to discuss how software development is classified. Historically, classification of software development were done around methodology and/or representations. Some common ways to look at development are: Procedural Programming (C, Fortran, BASIC, and many, many, many others) Object Oriented Programming (Java, C++, Smalltalk) Pipe Oriented Programming (Shell Scripting) Set Oriented Programming (SQL) Hybrids [...]

Project X Discussions has an interesting article about project staffing and the bloat that often occurs with data related projects. In a number of client environments I have often been amazed by the number of people that can be assigned to a project. Project Managers, Business Users, Business Analysts, Architects, Technical Analysts, Developers, Database Analysts, Database Administrators, Data Modelers, Subject Matter Experts, Testing specialists, Data [...]

The ongoing debate about the planetary status of Pluto is a really great example of how the standards-making process really works. Like most debates, everyone involved is supposed to be rational, thinking adults. The most rational, thinking people on earth: scientists. The debate is to keep Pluto classified as a planet or not. And, to be honest, I can’t think [...]

Slashdot had an interesting thread on creative responses to security threats. While the article itself was about wireless networking, the conversation that followed was very thought provoking (perhaps even inspiring). The problem was that people were having others try to piggy-back over their private wireless network. The solutions, ranged from scary to annoying to hilarious. Instead of taking the enterprise [...]

Introduction When an organization begins a concerted effort to improve its information quality, often it gets stuck in trying to figure out exactly where to start. This case study takes this to heart and gives a specific example of an approach to improving information quality. Previously, we had discussed the semantic and statistical approaches to information [...]

When an organization begins a concerted effort to improve its information quality, often it gets stuck in trying to figure out exactly where to start. This case study takes this to heart and gives a specific example of an approach to improving information quality. Previously, we had discussed the semantic and statistical approaches to information quality and [...]

One of the real challenges about information quality is that the field is still very abstract. In the academic world, the theories (like PSP/IQ) are still being written and discussed. In practice, this means that there isn’t a standard way of doing things. Or, to be more precise, everyone has a “standard” way of doing things, [...]