Monthly Archives: February 2012

Getting Data Integration Out of the Mud with Hypernormalized Data Designs

 Ralph Hughes | Feb 28, 2012  4 Responses
Feb 282012
 
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It still amazes me how many enterprise data warehousing/business intelligence (DW/BI) projects struggle, often to the point of paralysis, with the “Inmon/Kimball” debate. This impasse revolves around whether a DW/BI program should insist upon routing all information through a complex, third normal form (3NF) data layer or take it straight to a user-intelligible star schema repository from where it can be reported more or less directly. It’s easy to fault the 3NF for more than doubling the complexity, expense, and data latency of a DW/BI project, but also for being of zero direct value to the project sponsors and their stakeholders. On the other hand, projects that deliver data immediately to star schemas can quickly …

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 Business Intelligence  Tagged with:

The Consumerization of IT: Blessing or Curse?

 Christine Generali | Feb 21, 2012  No Responses
Feb 212012
 
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The “consumerization of IT” — in a big picture kind of way (not limited to “Bring Your Own Device”) — is having a huge effect on how IT is structured and delivered. It’s a “tipping point” with far reaching ramifications for companies, for employees and for the industry in general. The May 2012 Cutter IT Journal with Guest Editor Jim Love, explores what “consumerization” really means and invites submissions from those who are experiencing the changes first hand, from skeptics who see a different point of view and from those who have already started to plan for the changes that they envision. Please send us your ideas – proposals of interest are due 9 March …

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 General  Tagged with: ,

Agility, Adaptability, and Alignment

 Israel Gat | Feb 14, 2012  5 Responses
Feb 142012
 
Agility, Adaptability, and Alignment

It often starts as a seemingly plain training request. Having decided to go the agile route, a client would like Cutter to train a certain number of employees in one agile method or another. We collect data on the demographics of the target population: architects, UI designers, product managers, project managers, developers, testers, and so on. We then move on to discuss the way these folks are geographically dispersed and what the team structure for the launched agile teams will be. Once these parameters have been nailed down, it largely becomes a matter of figuring out the logistics for training and coaching. A fairly straightforward process for rolling out the agile process, one might say. …

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 Agile Project Management  Tagged with: , ,

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