Cubegeek

Say WH?

I have taken a position with WhittmanHart. No not a stock position, but a permanent position. I will be joining the WH team and working with those fine folks in bringing high quality EPM solutions to market. Everyone I have met there is a first class individual and I'm very excited and enthused to be a player on a winning team back in the Oracle/Hyperion world.

I appreciate all of the efforts by the many folks who have been assisting me in finding contracts and opportunities since January, but I will not be accepting any more offers for quite a while. Of course we can still do business...

You will of course, still be hearing from me here, and I expect more from WhittmanHart in the blogging world too, but I'm sure they will be keeping me real busy for the first few months.

Some Thinking about BI This Week

So I've been thinking a little more about the future of BI - the mid-term future. Of course I'm at a disadvantage because I haven't had the luxury to be at the latest trade shows or to talk to product managers or sales directors for a few months in the Oracle world. But ideas move fast, products move slow, so I can't be too far off. Here are some of my fast moving ideas.

Oracle has an entire business unit doing hosted apps, and hosted BI is just a step away. We could be very close to that. But what Google is doing is completely different from what IT is thinking. Still, I think we old school database people have to very seriously consider what Web development has done to leapfrog typical database tech in corporate IT. Corporate IT has no idea what kinds of crises they are going to face in 5 years as Salesforce and SAAS gets smarter. They may be reduced to security wonks and the guys rolling PCs around on carts. Definitely check out http://highscalability.com/

What Google is doing is interesting - I'm signed up for their apps thing, but haven't got the full invite yet. I'm thinking that Ray Ozzie's stuff in Office is going to take 4 more years to be as good as it was in Groove three years ago. So Google will have a practical headstart in collaborative stuff that scales. I've heard rumors that they might be interested in Basecamp. Mac is a big winner five years out because they will do a better job on UI in a ubiquitous web services world.

Let's stop at the corner of Mac street and BI Avenue. Why has the Mac not done well in business? Because Apple didn't know database and didn't do SQL. With so much of the customer facing applications in the thin client, there's some reason to head Mac's way, but not for the mainstream user. But what about the iPhone, and what about widgets? The mobile platform, especially multitouch is very tempting, and barriers to development are basically just cultural right now. Why shouldn't I have BI or EPM alerts on my iPhone? Why indeed.

Enterprise apps will get tighter and tighter on workflow until they squeeze all the brains out of it. IE consulting companies and apps companies like Oracle and SAP will continue to out-think corporate bosses and will develop more all-encompassing frameworks for intelligent workers. Employees will be more certified to run their workstations than to know what they're actually doing.

It's getting to a point at which custom applications delivery is getting more and more sophisticated and that developers like myself will be moving more massive containers and application frameworks than ever. It's certainly true that the major Hyperion consulting partners have specialized infrastructure guys just to do installs and certs on installs and these guys are up to their eyeballs in work. Migrations were a big issue at the recent Oracle conference - lifecycle management is the key word.

I'm interested in the progress of workflow management integration and quick, lightweight tools that can be as smart as blogs, but not as heavy and more special purposed than Twitter. Not to dog the Upstream guys, but there has got to be a cheaper way to work reconciliations through the data supply chain. I think Stowe Boyd may be on to something.

It is part of my natural curiosity to see how social software works (or could be made to work) in decision support frameworks. BI is just a small part of knowledge management and sure we're all close to the zeroes and dollars, but those are awfully lightweight data streams to move. It is astounding how isolated they can be and how little there is in the way of supporting the social aspects of the EPM cycle.

In case you haven't noticed, I've added KPI Library to the blogroll. This is the beginning of open sourcing BI and best practices. It can be as disrupting as blogs have been to customer service. OBIEE has a huge library of prefab analytics, it's can't be long until every department head everywhere comes to recognize the metrics that govern his department's value. The more well understood these frameworks for EPM become, the more simple BI will simply not do.

The Grinchbag Theory

(soon to be translated into Suessese)
The story of the grinchbag is simple. It is an IT parable based the story of the Grinch Who Stole Christmas.

Whoville is where all the users live, and throughout the year they gradually pile up their little Who requirements and expect at the end of the year that the IT Santa Claus will fulfill all their desires.

Now the Grinch may be anybody in this tale, but the point of the grinchbag theory is for whatever reasons, all of the goodies and wishes are accumulated into one giant bag and taken away from Whoville. And whenever you put everything into one grinchbag, it's awfully hard to move all at once.

So if you're holding the grinchbag at the top of the hill and you change your mind for any reason, you're going to have to grow your heart three times and attain superhuman strength to save Christmas. The fact of the matter is that you won't. You can only hope that the Whos will sing Dahoo Dory without their goodies, because the only thing superhuman strength does is save you from being crushed by the grinchbag.

The moral of the story is to spread goodies throughout the year and not try to gather up everything in one grinchbag. The Whos are going to sing with or without you. You really aren't in charge of their spirits, which you can't possibly understand because you don't live in Whoville.

(soon to be translated into Suessese)
The story of the grinchbag is simple. It is an IT parable based the story of the Grinch Who Stole Christmas.

Whoville is where all the users live, and throughout the year they gradually pile up their little Who requirements and expect at the end of the year that the IT Santa Claus will fulfill all their desires.

Now the Grinch may be anybody in this tale, but the point of the grinchbag theory is for whatever reasons, all of the goodies and wishes are accumulated into one giant bag and taken away from Whoville. And whenever you put everything into one grinchbag, it's awfully hard to move all at once.

So if you're holding the grinchbag at the top of the hill and you change your mind for any reason, you're going to have to grow your heart three times and attain superhuman strength to save Christmas. The fact of the matter is that you won't. You can only hope that the Whos will sing Dahoo Dory without their goodies, because the only thing superhuman strength does is save you from being crushed by the grinchbag.

The moral of the story is to spread goodies throughout the year and not try to gather up everything in one grinchbag. The Whos are going to sing with or without you. You really aren't in charge of their spirits, which you can't possibly understand because you don't live in Whoville.

BigTable Goes Public

I have been a big fan of BigTable ever since I learned about it. Ultimately, one of the things I'd to do is build massive MDBMS applications hosted in a parallelized cloud. I think Google is going to allow me to do that. The announcement is out there. Scoble has good links.

Part of the requirements are the use of Python, which I considered a few years back but ditched in favor of Ruby, which was only semi-baked at the time. I eventually lost interest in Ruby and Rails, but I still remember hearing stellar compliments paid to Python, which adherents believed would someday replace Perl. Now in my 7th year of Perl and ksh, I'm ready to switch - and given that Python is now, via BigTable, scalable to a practical infinity, I'm effecting the shift.

Immediately, I can see the practical uses for Python in my ordinary work. I've been meaning to make some basic masterdata tools for the longest time but I've only had VBA stuff inside Excel for my 'Big Button' interfaces. Since Tk is bundled with Python 2.5.2, I'm fairly sure that I should be building some neat little end-user tools in no time. I'm going to make the assumption that I can get them to look as cute as Google Gadgets - and so that's the name of that tune.

Snoop Poddy Pod

For Schneier's Movie Plot Contest, my first entry.

A recent study at the University of Wisconsin shows that 75% of minor children with iPods listen to inappropriate music. What's on your child's iPod? Think you know? Think again. Teens can easily alter the names of the songs on their iPod. Now thanks to a revolutionary new product, Snoop Poddy Pod, you can know exactly what kinds of messages your child is subjected to. Our Snoop Pod database analyzes the digital signature of thousands of offensive songs, updated daily, and checks to see which of those are synced to your child's iTunes. Snoop Pod parents are sent a weekly confidential email with the real scoop. Take back control with Snoop Poddy Pod.