There I was sitting quite unobtrusively (or so I thought) at the side of the room when someone suggested that Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing people from Australian and New Zealand tertiary institutions needed to communicate better and share the common details of their BI/DW journeys.
I’m at the 2008 Cognos Asia Pacific conference, this is my third such event and certainly the largest. Its the first one since IBM purchased Cognos at the end of last year for a reported USD$5bn.
There is without doubt a lot of commonality with basic HR, Finance, Student and other system reporting that universities currently have or want to have. Sharing approaches that do and don’t work in my view is not trading corporate IP, it’s helping peer organisations get the basics in place and not waste time reinventing things. This way we can turn our valuable and limited resources to developing capabilities that truly differentiate us and help to push the BI/DW game along a little further.
So that’s the basic premise, lets see where it takes us…
Hi Rob,
Saw your email last night about the need for this forum. I agree.
UTS is in the middle of a major upgrade to our BI capability that is leveraging a Federal govt grant (We will be reporting on the project at AAIR conference in November) Chatting this morning over coffee about the challenges of standardising definitions from different corporate systems (student, finance, personal, research, international) - I can’t help feeling it’s a futile ambition because it works against one of the fundamental forces in language and meaning, which is ambiguity. We all expect our IT department to expertly manage a mixed environment of different operating systems and databases. So why do we BI folk expect everyone else to use a single meaning for critical terms in our daily work lexicon? What approaches can be used to overcoming this supposed need for single definitions of key terms?
On another matter, I discovered the website of Curtin University’s “Digital Ecosystems & Business Intelligence Institute” (www.debii.curtin.edu.au), which has a pretty exciting ambitions about understanding the context in which BI is used. A bit of googling led me to a book “Digital Business Ecosytems” edited by Angelo Corallo (2007) which tries to shift the reader from a single organisation perspective on business intelligence to whole system view (industry, region, economy) of business intelligence. The stuff of a future AAIR conference I think.
Regards,
Michael Rothery
UTS
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