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Quick Takes for the Week of April 20, 2009


April 24: Eric Lai at Computerworld has written an informative and interesting piece on data loading. Data loading, according to Lai, historically is the forgotten element of the broader business intelligence process. Now, however, the virtually real-time nature of BI and analytics is making data loading a far more important – and therefore more interesting – topic.

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April 23: StreetSmarts Founder and CEO Dave Batt offers a look at how to address the ultimate unstructured data – “tribal knowledge” that exists solely in the mind of employees. The challenge, Batt writes, is that many of these minds are within the heads of baby boomers approaching retirement. His ebizQ commentary lays out the problem and offers advice on collecting this data before it moves to a condo in Florida.

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April 22: Mark Rittman, a co-founder of BI and data warehousing consultancy Rittman Mead, discusses the Oracle acquisition of Sun. At the beginning of the post he says that the impact is “not all that clear” and concludes that BI and data warehousing likely weren’t core concerns to the companies. He adds, however, that there will be benefits down the road for Oracle’s BI customers.

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April 21: A new Butler Group study says that saving money by putting BI and corporate performance management projects on the back burner is not a good idea. The implication is that such initiatives are even more important in tough economic times. I’m trying to arrange a podcast with report author Sarah Burnett. Update: A podcast with Burnett will be posted on Monday, April 27.

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April 20: Scott Staples, the co-CEO and President of MindTree, has written an interesting commentary at IT World in which he deconstructs the term business intelligence. BI is a great marketing term, he says, but the full value only is realized if it takes its place between data warehousing and analytics.