Let's not fill them up unless we absolutely have to. When I arrived at OptimalBI 2.5 years ago I was a stereotypical standalone researcher, meaning: Don't trust any data you didn't create yourself Teams slow you down so best to go it alone Everything must be perfect...
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So here are our latest blogs sharing what we have learnt lately, we hope it will make your life easier.
Surfacing the right conflict generates useful data requirements
Be glad you're not the pianist accompanying this duet. Photo: twitter.com/Patrick_J_Egan Our daily news is filled with people screaming at each other. Sometimes this is because their values differ fundamentally, but more often one person said something carelessly, the...
Lawrence Corr: Three things to be a great Agile BI teacher
Lawrence Corr in full swing at OptimalHQ, delivering Agile Data Warehouse Design. This November we are hosting Lawrence Corr of DecisionOne for his three-day workshop on Agile Data Warehouse design. Lawrence first came to New Zealand in March of 2015 to teach...
Your Agile data warehouse starts with: Who does what?
Where do you start a data project? Often we want to 'get into the data'. After all, we are data people; we got into this space because we like data. That isn't what Shaun did while working for a customer last year on a project that needed him to make sense of 13...
How to get requirements for better agile data warehouse design
About this time two years ago we delivered our first "An Optimal Introduction to BEAM✲" workshop. Since then a lot of water has gone under the bridge. We have refined the course a lot. We have taught new trainers how to teach the course. We have had Lawrence Corr come...
Software may eat the world, but it won't digest it unless we change
Good luck writing software to consume this! Source: flickr/avlxyz (CC BY-SA 2.0) In a now-famous article published in 2011, Marc Andreessen argued that software is eating the world, because Amazon destroyed Borders, etc. He warned that the market was undervaluing tech...
Don't start your project with code
Cool, I found that date field I was looking for on line 8! But also on line 9...damn...what now? Source: author's collection. A natural way for data people to start our projects is to "just get in to the data and see what's there." Almost every week, in fact, I tell a...
Three difficult steps to improving open data in New Zealand
These steps look difficult too. Are we going up or down? Source: Wikipedia (CC BY 2.0) You read that right, the steps are difficult. I'm not going to lie to you! I've written before about the promise and disappointment of open data. To those of us who work with it,...
Talking the walk on Agile Business Intelligence
Agile is trendy! It's all the rage these days to hold a few standups, start referring to weeks as "sprints", change your mind frequently, and claim to be Agile. As we like to say around here "that's ad hoc, not Agile!" And if you search "Agile BI" you'll find...
What makes a good business rule?
Good luck parsing these rules into your data warehouse! Source: Wikipedia You may have noticed some posts appearing about Optimal Data Engine (ODE), our open-source and language-agnostic tool for better data warehousing. Aside from the technical breakthroughs, what...