DataFlux

I’m not saying this to flatter you or anything, but if you’re reading this blog you’re probably already one of the good guys. By that I mean someone willing to self-educate in the best sense of the term, so you can do right by your company. - Read the rest of this entry »

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

This saying, coined by the French, probably applies more to life than it does to IT (Moore’s law being what it is). But every so often it’s true here too. In 2000 Addison Wesley published my first book — e-Data. While certainly exploiting the “e” that prefaced almost everything in those days, e-Data was less about “electronic” data and more about “enterprise” data. - Read the rest of this entry »

I was getting a haircut the other day and, while I was waiting my turn, I came across a coin catalogue that had been stuffed in a stack of magazines that included Vogue, The Men’s Journal, Vanity Fair, and endless journals dedicated to hair styles. One piece, oddly enough, was a catalog of valuable coins. Well, I’m not a coin collector, but with all the reading material available in the saloon, I couldn’t help thumbing through the slim catalogue’s oddly worn pages. - Read the rest of this entry »

New York City recently lost its bid for the Olympic Games, but — in what some would call a nice consolation prize, others a terrible karmic double-whammy — the city recently stole the Country Music Awards away from Nashville, Tennessee. It sort of reminds me of a data warehouse that was recently given a second chance. - Read the rest of this entry »

I recently sat through a long (over 30 slide) presentation chock full of graphs, each of which carrying multiple bits of information over a time series. While I love these kinds of presentations, the presenter had one habit that continually irked me. Time and again, the presenter would show a slide, point out some anomaly, highlight one or two interesting points, and immediately offer some justification for the anomaly. - Read the rest of this entry »

My wife is a biologist, and so I have had more than a few opportunities to learn about the way science works. Through her, I have also had the opportunity to speak to a number of scientists and even attend some scientific conferences and lectures. Of course, I can’t claim to have understood even a fraction of what I have heard, but I can say that I have found it all very interesting, particularly when scientists speak about the impact of data quality on scientific research. - Read the rest of this entry »

If you can feel sympathy for companies (as opposed to the individuals at these companies), then you can probably feel some sympathy for Eastman Kodak, the venerable maker of photographic equipment. The company has been in business since 1881, but in recent years its traditional film business has been declining because of the rise of digital photography. Have you priced a 35 mm film camera lately? - Read the rest of this entry »

Customer Data Integration (CDI) is currently a very hot topic in the data world, along with its fraternal twin, Master Data Management (MDM). Yet the concepts behind CDI are not new, nor revolutionary – in fact the fundamental operations associated with integrating customer data are exactly the same ones that have been employed in the data cleansing world for twenty years. So why all the to-do? - Read the rest of this entry »

In the November 2005 issue of Intelligent Enterprise magazine there’s an article called “Play to Your Strengths,” written by yours truly. The article covers the evolution of analytics in the mid-market and makes the case that — far from the laggards many portray them to be — mid-market firms actually have the means to outmaneuver their Fortune 1000 competitors when it comes to customer intelligence. - Read the rest of this entry »

I live in the Washington, DC area, and I have to say that the area is quite pleasant. The foliage around here is lush, and the climate is temperate. In fact, the average yearly rainfall is around 3.2 feet, while the average temperature during the fall is 60 degrees F. Significantly, the District’s official bird is the Wood Thrush. - Read the rest of this entry »