Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

A while back I published a blog post that claimed that Mount Everest was not the highest or even the biggest mountain on the Earth. Today I am going to make another startling claim: the recently closed 2012 Olympics were won not by the United States, China, Russia, or even host country United Kingdom. No, the 2012 Olympics were won by: (drum roll please) Grenada. Yes, that Grenada. The country that most USA folks probably didn’t even know existed until it was invaded by Clint Eastwood in Heartbreak Ridge.

Continue reading “Who Won The Olympics? It Depends How You Ask The Question…”

My second guest post at The Decision Factor has been published so you can catch up on more Business Intelligence lessons from Captain Kirk:

Business Intelligence Lessons from Star Trek — Part Two

As a community, BOB started out in the middle of the 1990’s, known then as the BUSOB-L mailing list. We converted over to a web-based bulletin board format in 2002. If you do the math, that would mean that 2012 is our 10^th birthday. I spoke with Courtney Bjorlin (follow her on Twitter @cbjorlin) of asugnews.com a few weeks ago and reminded her about our milestone, and she wrote up a fun top-ten list in honor of that anniversary.

If you haven’t read it yet, and you’re a fan of BOB, you definitely should give it a read.

What About BOB? 10 Reasons BOB Is Every BOBJ User’s Friend

My first guest blog post was published last week, complete with an error on my part that was immediately called out in the comments. 😳 I was writing about Captain James T. Kirk and the Star Trek series. Somehow, with “James” on my mind, I credited a “James Roddenberry” as the creator of the series! Obviously that was wrong, it was Gene Roddenberry.

The post was updated, and I addressed my error by responded to the comment…

Part one, titled, “Business Intelligence Lessons From Star Trek” is out now. Part two will be out in a week or two. Please check it out!

I’m willing to bet that over half of my blog readers know what the “T” stands for in James T. Kirk… before googling the result. 😉

I’ve been asked to provide some blog material for another site called The Decision Factor. I’m get to be a guest blogger! My first post for that site will be published soon, and it’s titled “Business Intelligence Lessons From Star Trek.” You know you’ll want to read it, and it won’t be published here. My guest blog posts for that site won’t be the technical solutions I often publish here, but instead will be more high-level conceptual business intelligence topics. They won’t feature any specific product or solution, whether from SAP or otherwise.

My posts will be tagged as part of the “BI 101” series. The first post in that series is out now, and was written by Christine Mykota. It’s titled, “Turbocharge Your Career with Intelligent Business Intelligence.” It’s worth a read, even if she doesn’t mention Captain Kirk… 😉

This afternoon SAP is hosting a virtual launch event for Visual Intelligence. You can read about it and register here.

BAM! That’s what you’ll be saying when you revolutionize the way you make business decisions. When you register for the forum, you can:

• Hear from Howard Dresner of Dresner Advisory Services, who will present his learning from Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study®.
• Attend the virtual launch of SAP® Visual Intelligence software, which means chances are, you’ll see what it can do long before the rest of your competition does.

One of the marketing strategies from Business Objects has always been to tout their semantic layer as the “single version of the truth.” Which brings me to today’s quiz on geography:

1. What is the highest mountain on Earth?
2. What is the tallest mountain on Earth?
3. Which mountain on Earth has the biggest elevation gain?

Continue reading “It Depends On Your Reference Point”

If only it were that easy!

(See blog subject in case it’s not clear what I’m talking about…)

One of my goals for this blog was to make sure I kept to my schedule of at least two blog posts per month. Normally May would be an exciting month as I would be attending the ASUG Annual Conference which is co-located with the SAPPHIRE event down in Orlando. In fact I think this is the first year out of the past three (or four?) that I have missed it. Conferences always seem to provide a lot of inspiration for posting. However, for a variety of reasons I am not attending the event this year. That means plenty of time left for other stuff, yes?

As it turns out, the last few months (actually some of the development started well over a year ago) I have been busy working on the next iteration of BOB. We’re coming up on our tenth anniversary as a community, and I wanted to spiff things up a bit. Some of the changes will be visible, some are primarily for tuning or optimization, and some are intended to make things more efficient for our fine moderator team. But the point is, there is still a bit of work to be done, and I really wanted to have the release done before the end of May. That means that unless I really can ask the universe for more time, I will be taking a vacation from this blog in order to concentrate on getting the BOB updates finished and tested. That means things may be a bit quiet here for the month.

Just a random image from one of my favorite online comics:

I think I’m going to try this in my next presentation. 😎

In part one of this series (What Does It Take To Become A Blogger?) I talked about what it takes to become a blogger by answering the “Five W’s” of reporting. In part two (Blogging for Dollars? Or Something Else?) I went a bit further into depth on reasons for blogging, how much money you should expect to make (or not make), and covered some of the financial costs of running a blog. In part three I want to talk about what happens after you start blogging. The worst possible case is that you put yourself out there and nobody notices. Let’s assume that’s not going to happen. 🙂

Content Is King

I talked previously about setting up a posting schedule and sticking to it. This becomes the “pulse” of your blog and I think it’s one of the most important attributes of your new online presence (call it brand or whatever else you like). I tend to post mostly technical articles that are designed to solve a specific problem. That’s what I do in real life (solve problems, or at least attempt to do so). That makes it easy for me to carry that over into my blog life. (Hopefully solving more than I cause. ;)) That being said, what if I don’t have any blog posts ready to go for a particular month? Do I make up some fluff in order to maintain my self-imposed posting schedule, or do I just skip a month? Maybe I should just post a movie review or talk about my latest technical toy that I have purchased to fill in the gaps?

Or perhaps not…

Continue reading “Exposing Yourself To The Internet”