video

How to use your BI Tool to Highlight Deficiencies in Data

Peter James Thomas business intelligence, cultural transformation, data governance, data quality, microsoft , ,

My interview with Microsoft’s Bruno Aziza (@brunoaziza), which I trailed in Another social media-inspired meeting, was published today on his interesting and entertaining bizintelligence.tv site.

You can take a look at the canonical version here and the YouTube version appears below:

The interview touches on themes that I have discussed in:

 

Informatica interview

Peter James Thomas business intelligence, data warehousing, informatica ,

While spring cleaning at home at the weekend, I came across a DVD of an interview I did for Informatica back in March 2005. This is still accessible on the Informatica web-site and appears in my video library, but I thought that I had lost my copy of the original.

Having made this discovery, I added it to my selection of videos on YouTube.com.
 

 
In the interview I stress the need for consistency in management information; the dynamics of the Insurance industry and the business value added by Business Intelligence in a pan-European insurance organisation.
 

 
Disclosure – Part I: In the work I refer to above, I leveraged Infomatica’s toolset (PowerCentre) alongside software from Oracle (RDBMS and PL/SQL), IBM Cognos (PowerPlay and ReportStudio) and Microsoft (.NET). I have used tools from other vendors in other projects. While there is clearly a promotional sub-text to the video, it is not a product endorsement and I believe that my comments are generally applicable to any business intelligence / data warehousing project.
 
Disclosure – Part II: I have already had it pointed out to me – by @ocdqblog and others – that the braces (suspenders if you are from the US; suspenders having quite a different connotation in the UK) were perhaps something of a fashion faux pas. My American partner has long since despaired of my British approach to “co-ordination” of patterns. You may be glad to know that I no longer own the offending item.
 

The Perils of Extrapolation

Peter James Thomas business intelligence , ,

A while back, I posted a brief article Especially for all Business Analytics professionals out there borrowing from xkcd.com to warn about the pitfalls in uncritically using the past to predict the future.

I expanded on this theme to include it in my presentation slide deck and have been playing about with various PowerPoint to video technologies with the following result (note: the video has no sound):
 

 
Apologies for the poor fidelity, maybe I should paid for a conversion tool, rather than using a free one.
 

 
PS The function in question above is √x log x, which is of importance in Number Theory; specifically in Koch’s approximation that (assuming the Riemann hypothesis):

Helge von Koch and the prime-counting function in terms of the logarithmic integral (eat your heart out J K Rowling)

On a less mathematical note, you can see me in some rather higher quality videos here.