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9sight PublicationsThe Seven Faces of Data, Rethinking data’s basic characteristics November 2011, Sponsored by Teradata, Inc. This paper proposes seven fundamental traits of data structure, composition and use that enable IT professionals to examine existing and new data sources and respond to the opportunities and challenges posed by new business demands and novel technological advances. Freedom from Facets, Discovering the data you really need October 2011, Sponsored by NeutrinoBI. In this paper, we describe freeform search--a method that enables business users with no knowledge of data structures and relationships to explore for themselves their structured business data in a wholly unstructured and adaptive manner. Data Warehouse Design Redux, A Data Driven Approach May 2011, Sponsored by WhereScape USA, Inc. This paper first explores the issues that plague data warehouse development projects and the most common trades-off made by vendors and developers. One compelling solution, the concept of data driven design is described, and a number of recommendations are provided on how data warehouse design and population activities can be best structured for maximum accuracy and reliability in estimating project scope and schedule. From BI to Enterprise IT Architecture, February 2011, from a series of articles published on B-Eye-Network.com from February 2010 to January 2011 Data warehousing / business intelligence has played a remarkable role in IT over the past few decades. It has remained a relatively closed ecosystem, both in terms of the vendors involved and the delivery teams within IT organizations. Signs are that that's all about to change as the boundaries between operational and informational computing become increasingly blurred and Enterprise 2.0 finally catches on in business. This article explores the business and technological drivers for this change and its far-reaching implications for architects, developers and vendors alike. And it describes the architecture that's needed to move the focus from business intelligence to the wider world of enterprise architecture. Beyond Business Intelligence, Business Intelligence Journal, Vol. 15, No. 2, June 2010 It has been almost 25 years since the original data warehouse was conceived. Although the term business intelligence (BI) has since been introduced, little has changed from the original architecture. Meanwhile, business needs have expanded dramatically and technology has advanced far beyond what was even envisioned in the 1980s. These business and technology changes are driving a broader and more inclusive view of what the business needs from IT, not just in BI but across the entire spectrum--from transaction processing to social networking. If BI is to be at the center of this revolution, we practitioners must raise our heads above the battlements and propose a new, inclusive architecture for the future. Business integrated insight (BI2) is that architecture. This article focuses on the information component of BI2--the business information resource. I introduce a data topography and a new modeling approach that can support data warehouse implementers to look beyond the traditional hard information content of BI and consider new ways of addressing such diverse areas as operational BI and (so-called) unstructured content. This is an opportunity to take the next step beyond BI to provide complete business insight. Beyond the Data Warehouse,
A Unified Information Store for Data and Content, May 2010 The worlds of data and content are on a collision course! With ever-growing hordes of content gathering in the business and on the Internet, the old civilization of the data warehouse is under siege. But, never fear! A solution is emerging--the outcome will be integration, not annihilation. Based on over twenty years of information architecture experience from data warehousing, this paper first shows data and content as two ends of a continuum of the same business information asset and explores the depth of integration required for full business value. We then define a unified information store (UIS) architecture as the approach to unification. The heart of this store is a core set of business information, indexes and metadata, originating from up-front enterprise modeling and text analytics of information when loaded and at the point of use, which ensure both data quality and agility. The business outcome is analytics that combine the precision of data querying with the relevance of content search, independent of the information source and structure. Software vendors from both viewpoints--data and content--are already delivering products that blend the two worlds. Businesses that begin to implement a unified information store stand to gain early adopter advantage in this rapidly growing market. Business Integrated Insight BI2,
Reinventing enterprise information management, August 2009 "Le Roi est mort. Vive le Roi!" The message of this paper is at one with this ancient proclamation: the rule of the king continues through the end of one era and the beginning of the next. The data warehouse has had a long and illustrious reign, but today a combination of business and technological change has laid the old king low. But, fear not! The young prince stands strong at his father's bedside, ready to lead the kingdom to new victories. This paper proposes a new architectural model for decision-making in all its guises throughout the enterprise. The new model, Business Integrated Insight (BI2), emerges directly from re-evaluating decision-making in a 21st-century business, and reviewing recent technological advances in databases, messaging, and social computing. The message is one of technology evolution, rather than revolution--current data warehouse technologies, particularly dedicated implementations, will play a central role in the new order. We begin with a review of the prevailing business and IT paradigms from which the original data warehouse architecture emerged and evolved in the 1980s and 1990s and the problems it now faces. Section two makes the case for a new approach, and proposes five new postulates for the future. In section three, we describe the BI2 architecture, leading to a number of use cases and key considerations for implementation in section four. The final section summarizes the paper's main points. Collaborative Analytics,
Sharing and Harvesting Analytic Insights across the Business, June 2009 Business analysts are, by tradition, hunter-gatherers. Independently or in small, close-knit groups, they stalk the wild data resources of the business, seeking out new and unusual facts, and building from them deep insights into the meaning of business life and events. Armed with little more than their spreadsheets, they single-handedly recalculate cells and pivot tables in search of that "ah-ha" moment when innovation emerges from its lair. Meanwhile, IT labors hard, and often at great cost, to provide a quality-assured, comprehensive and integrated warehouse of information as the basis for corporate reporting and planning. This valuable data resource often lies ignored or distrusted by pioneering business analysts. Today's business cannot afford the luxury of this disconnect. This paper examines the sources of this unfortunate division and introduces the adaptive information cycle, a model that links the center-out approach of traditional data warehousing to the edge-based, emergent prototyping that characterizes today's analytic environment. By combining concepts from integrated development environments, social networking and collaborative working, the adaptive information cycle reunites Business Intelligence and Business Analytics. Beyond the conceptual level, LyzaTM Commons shows the real functionality needed to allow business analysts to collaborate more closely and to enable IT to harvest the fruits of their innovation for the wider user community. Analytic Databases in the World of the Data Warehouse, BI ThoughtLeaderTM by ParAccel, April 2009 The majority of companies have implemented their business intelligence (BI) environments according to a physically layered data warehouse architecture and based on traditional general-purpose relational databases. Specialized analytic databases using technologies such as columnar orienta-tion, massively parallel processing and other techniques have now emerged. Such new DBMSs now offer significantly improved performance for typical BI applications, enable previously impossible analyses and often lower cost implementation. They also have the potential to challenge the current physically layered Data Warehouse architecture. This paper reexamines the trade-offs that have been made in the layered architecture and argues that analytical databases may enable a move to a simpler non-layered architecture with significant benefits in terms of lower costs of implementation, maintenance, and use. Playmarts: Agility with Control,
Reconnecting Business Analysts to the Data Warehouse, December 2008 One key group of potential users of Business Intelligence tools and Data Warehouse data has been seriously underserved for many years. These power business analysts resort to a mish¬mash of desktop productivity tools to support them in their search for innovative answers in the ever-growing jungles of enterprise data. IT departments trying to keep control of the corporate data asset through the data warehouse architecture denounce the "spreadmarts" thus created. Indeed, business analysts themselves also often wish that there was a better way. This paper introduces a new category of data mart--the "playmart"--to address the needs of both business analysts and IT. In essence, a playmart provides agility for users through freeform, iterative exploration of data from multiple sources (playing with the data) in a safe, controlled and traceable environment (a mart). The goal, simply, is to provide users the freedom to innovate, while maintaining corporate auditability; to find unique business value in enterprise data and to ensure it is valid and repeatable when needed. The playmart is more than a concept, however. A new tool--LyzaTM--provides a significant first set of the functionality that the playmart requires. Previous WorkBarry wrote the first published article describing a data warehouse architecture in 1988, based on his work in IBM Europe's internal IT division in the preceding years. 
One the seminal books on data warehousing, Barry's 1997 book contains a wealth of architectural and practical information. It continues to be relevant today and has sold over 10,000 copies. In recent years, Barry has written a number of series of White Papers for IBM on the emergence of new trends in collaborative computing and the emergence of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), with particular emphasis on the implications for how IT will support business in the future.
Barry is a regular contributer to the UK edition of B-Eye Network where he blogs regularly. The following series of papers can be found on his Articles Page:
Previous publications include:
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