I am learning what to do with frustration. Write.
It is turning out that I am beginning to become passionately intolerant of what I expect the industry to be doing at this late date and the industry has simply not done. And so I'm going to have to write the books. I might have done this long ago, but the passion simply wasn't there. Now I am convinced that without my input, certain things that are possible, simply won't be attempted, and I further realize that I will not be able to help personally, no matter how much I would like to. And so I am initializing my new writing project: Managing Essbase Projects.
It might all be for naught, but even with the assumption that the current installed base of full Essbase licenses continues to shrink at 15% per year, there are still going to be projects out there that need to be managed. And I suspect that even those transitioning out of the product will benefit from the stuff I'll put in the book.
I'd like to get on to the next big thing, which is (Yay Research Channel) DISC in my Tabletop multitouch metaphor, but I'll have plenty of time to get familiar with that. In the meantime I need to put all of this Essbase behind me. It came to me today when I realized that the first Admin Guide that I wrote for Essbase is about 10 years old, and yet in those 23 pages are things that many customers - even owners of Essbase for five years still don't know.
The book has to be written. And so it begins.
It will include Design for Analysis, which is an iterative JAD/RAD methodology - the necessary documents, the attitude, the skillsets, the pitfalls and opportunities of building custom Essbase projects. It will include meta-information surrounding master data management, hub & spoke strategies, data management, performance tuning, testing, support, rollout, strategic assessments, capacity planning and a host of other issues. Not so much about doing them, but how to manage doing them in the context of a successful project. The very process of building analytical systems is a mystery that I will clarify. So what if it's the 100th book on IT methodology? There isn't one about Essbase, yet.
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