mip's scan

Requirements Gathering for Business Intelligence Initiatives & Other Musings

I've had a few quiet days with the onset of the holidays and that has given me time to read and write.  It's given me time to think.  About what?  Well, a colleague of mine asked me to think about ways to evolve our approach to capturing requirements and doing analysis for our business intelligence projects.  We have a dedicated group that delivers outstanding EDW and BI initiatives and this colleague wanted me to see what tools/techniques from my advisory services practice could be leveraged in our BI work.  I've been thinking about this since he mentioned it to me late last week and wanted to get some thoughts down to help evolve my thinking.  

To do so, let's look at something unrelated to technology.  Building a house.  When building a house, you spend a considerable amount of time capturing requirements.  Once you are done, you had those requirements over to the various trades people and they go off and build your house.  This makes sense to us and it lends itself into the tech world to application development or web development.  When I am engaged by clients to build websites or web-based applications, we often spend a lot of time capturing the requirements.  It is absolutely critical.  Like building a house, once you've captured those requirements though, they are handed off to graphic designers, developers, testers and away they go.  They build what was needed based on the requirements.  

This approach however doesn't apply to business intelligence initiatives.  I've witnessed this first hand on projects I've observed.  It is often complex to capture requirements, and that can be true of web development projects as well.  The difference, however, is that BI requirements seem to be a constantly moving target throughout the project.  That makes it challenging.  It would be like handing blueprints to the trades people building a home, and then, once they have the framing done the unexpectedly find out that the physical properties of lumber have changed on them and they now need to reconsider things.  That of course doesn't happen when building a home, but in BI projects, this kind of shifting does happen.  The question is why?   

As I puzzled on this I recalled a wonderful article that Peter Thomas wrote where he used an excellent metaphor for BI projects, equating them more to an archaeological dig than building houses.  The point of his article is that as you begin an archaeological dig you find unexpected things under the ground so to speak.  No amount of requirements gathering is going to tell you what you will find once you start digging down into the data.  

Web-Based Operating Systems: The Wonder of Jolicloud

Much fanfare occurred a short while ago with regards to Google's OS which is based on it's browser paradigm Chrome.  To get a sense of what exactly Google's OS is promising, take a look at this video.  In a nutshell, it is a browser. You press the power button on your laptop/PC and instead of going into Windows (or some other traditional OS) you effectively go into a browser.  The paradigm really shifts from the localized operating system, to a web-centric operating system.  

My post today though isn't about the Google OS.  It's available in various hacked forms and virtual machines, but really, it isn't ready for prime time.  It's exciting, don't get me wrong, but not present yet.

You don't have to wait for the future though, because if you are looking for a taste of what a WebOS is like, there is a very robust and innovative OS you can download and install - today.  I'm talking about Jolicloud.  

Demonstration of Lazyfeed

I started using an interesting online tool called Lazyfeed that has an interesting way to stream (visually) updates from the web along topics you want to follow.  I thought that rather than trying to describe this via a written post that a quick screencast would best demonstrate how this tool works since it is highly visual in nature.  You can either play the video below, or go to YouTube and select HQ for a higher quality version of it.

The New HSPA+ Rocket Stick from Rogers Wireless

I've been a long time user of the Roger's Rocket Stick USB device that allows me to jump onto the Internet wherever and whenever I like when I'm away from home or the office.  I'd written a review of the stick I'd been using but wanted to update my thoughts now that I've been using their newest USB cellular modem, the HSPA+ Rocket Stick. 

From the Roger's site, the key functions of this new stick are as follows:

1. Download speeds of up to 21.6 Mbps on the Rogers HSPA+ network, faster than ever before
2. Zero-Install Plug and Play Software (No CD required) for Windows® 2000, XP, Vista or Mac OS X 10.4 and above
3. Multi-colour LED indicator for real-time service status, technology modes, and error conditions
4. Enhanced functionality with memory storage capability up to 8GB
   Small and compact USB form-factor with integrated antenna

Let me step through what I've found for the first two claims in the above listed items (the two that matter most in my opinion).  Let's start with the most important - download speeds.  The claim is up to 21.6 Mbps.  The key words to take note of in that claim is up to as they are important.  Those 2 little words mean that your speed can go up 21.6Mbps or you could, at any one given time, be below that.  For my, over the past month, I've been below that speed claim. No surprise here.  I knew that going in.  What is important is that the new HSPA+ Rocket Stick from Rogers is a lot faster than the previous Rocket Stick.  I have done numerous speed tests from numerous locations around the GTA and on average I have gotten ~12Mbps.  That is pretty good.  The highest I've had is 16Mbps and the lowest was 5Mbps.

Basecamp - Power in the Cloud

I have used a fantastic tool called Basecamp for quite some time.  It is a tool created by 37Signals and has been out for a long while and probably reviewed dozens of times before. I wanted to write a brief post about this tool though because of the tremendous value I have gotten from it over the past year.  More importantly, I wanted to write about it because it is a great example of applications that are available on the internet, or, to use the term used today, an app that is in the cloud.  I am a tech at heart and love to deploy things internally, but I see increasingly, how powerful the "in-the-cloud" model is about to become.  Before I go too far, though, let's talk a little about Basecamp first.

Basecamp has allowed me to dynamically created shared project workspaces.  The important thing here is that I use it for projects.  I don't think that Basecamp is effective for a long-term repository.  37Signals has other tools for corporate-like Intranets.  Basecamp allows me to setup shared spaces that revolve around projects, and I create those spaces with members from my own team and the client team.  That is the first powerful aspect of this cloud-based application.  By being in the cloud members from different organizations can easily access Basecamp, which is not always the case when you deploy something internally.  

The Rise of eBooks & the eReader

eBook and eReaders have been around for some time now.  I had used a Cybook for some time, but always found it to be poorly constructed (plastic) and not easy to get books from my Mac to the unit.  It was also sluggish at times, which detracted from the experience.

Still, I very much liked the ability to carry multiple books with me when I wanted.  I never wrote a post about my experience as I felt I didn't have much to say beyond my personal opinion, which was, that the eReader was something I liked, but not entirely practical or ready for prime time.

A short while I go, I started using the Sony eReader.  It was the Touch edition that allowed me to literally "flip" pages.  The device is incredibly solid; very well built.  I have very much enjoyed using it and like the fact that it is more open than other units, like the Kindle (for a comparison of the features, click here).  I particularly like being able to download books from the Toronto library. As with my original eReader, I like the immediacy of buying a book and downloading it.  It is akin to the way I buy music and movies. 

The question for today's post is whether this device will replace the physical book?  Will students, for example, carry an electronic reader rather than house dozens of textbooks in their lockers and school bags?  Blyth Academy here in Toronto has begun to utilize the Sony eReader.  The video announcing this historic move is below.  Will this be something that catches on?