Analysis by ETL …

Performing source-system analysis by writing ETL is just about the most expensive way you can do it; but many organisations do exactly that. Why? Because they “can’t afford” to do their analysis the cheaper way. No,…

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The project wiki – a cost reduction tool

Some readers will be familiar with TED: Ideas Worth Spreading a series of talks on just about everything worthwhile in Technology, Education and Design. I recently revisited Yochai Benklers talk on the new open-source economics from 2005 where he explains…

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BI Convention over Configuration

The convention over configuration discussion when designing a data warehouse often leads to fanatical discussions by technical people over the ‘best’ approach to do things. Convention can be used to define the standard way to design…

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Version Control on Rails

In my consultancy assignments, I usually work in large organisations that have outsourced IT departments and very formal processes for everything. One aspect of this is version control. In such an organisation every document contains a…

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Agile Development of a BI application

Wandering around the web I found a presentation by Soren Burkhart of Hawaii Business Consulting, LLC given at the Rails Conference in Portland, Oregon (May 2007) that describes a classic agile approach to developing a Business Intelligence application…

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Can Business Intelligence Be Agile ?

The agile manifesto and it’s underlying principles set out four key values for developing software solutions: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan If an organisation is…

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